Acclaimed singer-songwriter Steve Earle is "Alone Again" at District Live

District Live is collaborating with Savannah Music Festival to bring one of the most celebrated American songwriters of his generation to the stage.

Steve Earle began his career as a country artist with his acclaimed 1986 debut album, "Guitar Town," but quickly branched out into everything from rock and roll, folk, blues, and bluegrass. Despite a reputation for being an outlaw with substance abuse problems, stormy marriages, and rocky relationships with record labels, Earle has recorded dozens of albums and written songs for artists such as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, The Pretenders, EmmyLou Harris, Joan Baez, and many others.

Earle’s 1988 hit song “Copperhead Road” was made the official state song of Tennessee, and in 2020 he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

When it comes to touring, Earle has a surprisingly long history of performing in Savannah.

“I go back to Tim Coy’s Night Flight Café there on the river,” said Earle during an interview over Zoom. “Back in the early ;80s, I had a rockabilly band. A lot of the bands in the Carolinas and Nashville who played original material played there…Savannah was a regular stop for pretty much everybody."

Earle and his bandmates used to crash at the notorious Chateau Debris, a carriage house that sat in a lane near Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House. Mrs. Wilkes was Earle’s favorite spot to eat back then, and he asked if it still existed. I pointed out that is does, but often has lines going all the way to the end of the street.

“I think that’s one of the weakest things in the American character is our unwillingness to queue up,” said Earle. “Everywhere else in the world, people shut the f*** up and line up. The places where the lines are, that’s the good stuff.”

Earle said that although he is heterosexual, he has always appreciated Savannah’s embracing of LGBTQ communities, a rare quality in the '80s that made Savannah a favorite stop on tours.

“Anywhere I can see a mixed-race, same-sex couple walking around holding hands, I feel safe,” said Earle.

Earle’s next release is a live album due out on July 12 called "Alone Again (Live)." Since his band, The Dukes, disbanded Earle has been touring as a solo act. It’s a throwback to his early days playing acoustic guitar in coffee shops.

“This is the continuation of a tour that started last summer, and the live album is a documentation of that first leg of the tour,” explained Earle. “The live album is very similar to the show you’ll hear in Savannah.”

Earle was a protégé of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, having played in their bands when he was a young man in the 1970s. In the years since, Earle has shared his collected songwriting knowledge while mentoring new generations of songwriters through workshops like Camp Copperhead or a recent stint on the Outlaw Country Cruise.

“Guy was more of a hands-on teacher, although he probably wouldn’t have thought of it that way,” said Earle. “You could ask him questions and he would answer them. He’d show me how he laid out stuff on a page. He also tried to trick me and offered me a rhyming dictionary which he didn’t believe in at the time in the mid-'70s, but trust me, at the end of his life, he was using the f*** out of a rhyming dictionary. I use a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus, and I have for a long time.”

Earle added, “Townes would give me a copy of 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and tell me to go read it.”

One of the important lessons Earle imparts on his students is to, first and foremost, be a voracious reader.

“You can’t write if you don’t read, and what I teach is songwriting as literature because I’m a post-Bob Dylan songwriter,” said Earle. “It’s the idea that there are other people that were writing their own folk songs in the Village besides Bob. They were all reading the same French modernist poets, but everyone else kept just writing songs that sounded like Woody Guthrie, and Bob wrote ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and applied that.

“I believe that lyrics elevated rock and roll to an art form. Without Bob, it just becomes songs about cars and girls and it’s just a sub-genre of pop music and doesn’t become a high art form. Yes, he deserved the Nobel Prize for literature, and it is literature—the best literature of the time during when I was growing up.”

Did you know Steve Earle also writes songs for plays and musicals?

As someone who has long harbored a reputation for bad behavior and being an outlaw (although a 1994 arrest in Nashville for heroin possession led to rehab and a clean slate), it may surprise many fans that Earle’s current passion is musical theater. Earle has written music for several plays and is currently working on a musical adaptation of Horton Foote’s screenplay and movie, 1983's "Tender Mercies," with playwright Daisy Foote.

“Theater has always been my favorite artform for a lot of reasons,” said Earle. “My grandmother, she was a seamstress and wardrobe mistress for a college drama department in northeast Texas called Lon Morris College. They had a great theater department—Tommy Tune came out of there. They did a musical, a straight play, and Shakespeare every year. They had their own theater in the middle of nowhere in a dry county.”

Drama was the also the only class in high school that didn’t kick a young rebellious Earle out.

“I didn’t get kicked out of drama or physical science,” recalled Earle. “The science teacher had the best local country band in San Antonio, named George Chambers. They were the only two guys who didn’t kick me out of their classes.”

Earle eventually had his own theater company, BrokenAxe, in Nashville.

“I didn’t really think I wanted to write musicals and then I moved to New York. I’d come to believe that I hated musical theater and it turns out I only hated Andrew Lloyd Webber, well, besides 'Jesus Christ Superstar.'”

Earle makes a distinction between Webber, whose work he considers opera, and American book musicals, where characters burst into music between dialogue.

“We invented that artform just like the blues and bluegrass and rock and roll,” explained Earle.

Earle has recently come around to opera, however, thanks to his friend singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Earle’s 14-year old autistic son, John Henry, had taken an interest in classical music, so Earle wanted to see his first opera. Rufus and his father, Loudan Wainwright III, took Earle to see Richard Wagner’s "Tannhauser," at the Metropolitan Opera.

“It was a trip and blew my mind because it’s mind-blowing visually,” said Earle.

Earle has written so many memorable songs for himself and other great artists, that it bears the question—are there any songs he wishes he wrote?

“It kind of connects indirectly through Rufus, but 'Hallelujah,' and as much as it gets done to death there’s a reason for that,” answered Earle. “I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan, but that song, I suppose it stems from being a songwriter, but most of the time it would scare me to even think about writing a song that is essentially about songwriting, and it is.”

Earle also cites plenty of Beatles and Rolling Stones songs he wishes he wrote, and his favorite Bob Dylan song is “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

“It’s one of those things where I grew up in an era where there were so many great songwriters and great songs, and it makes the bar high,” said Earle.

With Earle’s vast catalog of songs, there are probably plenty of artists who wish they wrote one of his songs, as well. “Galway Girl” from 2000’s Transcendental Blues, for example, is regularly requested at Irish pubs and weddings.

“Well, there’s a lot of musicians in Ireland that want to kill me for writing that song, too,” Earle said with a laugh.

If You Go >>

What: Steve Earle

When: 8 p.m., June 13

Where: District Live, 400 W. River St.

Cost: $60

Info: plantriverside.com/district-live/

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Singer-songwriter Steve Earle is Alone Again at District Live