Steve Earle

He was born on 17 January 1955 at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and grew up in Schertz, Texas, north of San Antonio. He got his first guitar at eleven and at thirteen took third place in his school district’s talent show. At fourteen he went to Houston to stay with his uncle Nick Fain, then nineteen, who encouraged his playing, and there he met Townes Van Zandt, who inspired him to make music his career. He left high school in 1971 and worked framing houses. At nineteen he moved to Nashville, where he played in bands, took odd jobs and made his first record, singing harmony on Guy Clark’s Old No. 1 (RCA, 1975), including “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” He also appeared in the documentary Heartworn Highways. His first publishing deal was as a staff writer for Sunbury Dunbar, at $75 a week; Carl Perkins recorded his “Mustang Wine,” and “When You Fall in Love,” which he wrote with John Scott Sherrill, reached No. 14 for Johnny Lee in 1982.

His own records began with Pink & Black, a four-song EP with his band the Dukes, produced by Roy Dea and Pat Carter for their LSI label in 1982. From 1982 to 1985 he cut rockabilly sides for Epic, two of which made the country chart, “Nothin’ But You” (No. 70, 1983) and “What’ll You Do About Me” (No. 76, 1984); Epic gathered them in 1987 as Early Tracks.

Moving to MCA, he made Guitar Town with the producers Tony Brown and Emory Gordy Jr. and a band that included Richard Bennett on guitar, Harry Stinson on drums and Bucky Baxter and Paul Franklin on pedal steel. It came out in March 1986 and topped the Billboard country album chart, and its title song reached No. 7, the highest-charting country single of his career; both drew Grammy nominations in 1987. Exit 0 (1987), credited to Steve Earle and the Dukes, gave him a No. 20 country single in “Nowhere Road.” Copperhead Road (Uni, October 1988), produced with Brown at Ardent Studios in Memphis, leaned toward rock: the Pogues played on “Johnny Come Lately,” recorded in London, while “Nothing But a Child” brought in Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Sam Bush on mandolin, Mark O’Connor on fiddle and Edgar Meyer on bass. Its title song became an official state song of Tennessee in 2023. The Hard Way (1990) and the live Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator (1991) completed his contract with MCA.

Four years passed without a new album. In 1994 Barbara Behler and Mark Brown of Warner/Chappell and his former manager John Dotson made a promotional CD of his songs, Uncut Gems, which led Travis Tritt and Stacy Dean Campbell to record “Sometimes She Forgets” and Robert Earl Keen “Tom Ames’ Prayer.” His return, Train A Comin’ (Winter Harvest, 1995), was an acoustic record made in Nashville and produced with William Alsobrook, with Norman Blake on guitar, Dobro, mandolin and fiddle, Peter Rowan on mandolin, mandola and gut-string guitar, Roy Huskey Jr. on bass, and Emmylou Harris singing on two songs. Alongside his own songs it took in Van Zandt’s “Tecumseh Valley,” Blake’s “Northern Winds” and the Beatles’ “I’m Looking Through You,” and it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. He then started his own label, E-Squared, which issued I Feel Alright (1996) and El Corazón (1997); on the latter’s “I Still Carry You Around” he played and sang with Del McCoury and his band for the first time.

That meeting led to The Mountain, released by E-Squared on 23 February 1999 as Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band. Earle wrote all fourteen songs as a tribute to Bill Monroe, and it was the first wholly bluegrass album he had made. It was recorded at Room & Board in Nashville with Earle on guitar and lead vocals, Del McCoury on guitar and tenor, Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Rob McCoury on banjo, Jason Carter on fiddle and Mike Bub on bass, with guests including Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas, Gene Wooten, Iris DeMent and Emmylou Harris. It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Earle and the band toured together in 1999, including some thirty days in Europe, but he left the tour early and the partnership ended there.

In the years that followed, his albums drew a run of Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary Folk Album, for Transcendental Blues (2000) and Jerusalem (2002), and three wins: The Revolution Starts…Now (2004) at the 2005 awards, Washington Square Serenade (New West, 2007), named Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album in 2008, and Townes (2009), fifteen songs by Van Zandt, in 2010. He produced records for other artists, among them Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Joan Baez’s Day After Tomorrow (2008). He took recurring roles in the HBO series The Wire and Treme, and “This City,” from Treme, was nominated for a Grammy in 2011. He wrote the score for the off-Broadway play Samara (2009) and appeared in it, published a collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, and a novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive (2011), whose companion album of the same name was nominated for a Grammy, and became host of Hardcore Troubadour on the Outlaw Country channel of Sirius radio.

Later albums with the Dukes included The Low Highway (2013), Terraplane (2015) and So You Wannabe an Outlaw (2017). He followed Townes with GUY (2019), an album of Guy Clark’s songs, and Jerry Jeff (2022), songs by another early mentor, Jerry Jeff Walker. He wrote music for the play Coal Country, appeared in it and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and released Ghosts of West Virginia in 2020, the year he entered the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. J.T. (New West, January 2021) set ten songs by his son, the singer and songwriter Justin Townes Earle, beside one new song of his own. A live solo album, Alone Again… Live, followed in July 2024.

On 26 April 2025, after he played “Copperhead Road” on the Grand Ole Opry, Vince Gill invited him to join, the first invitation of the Opry’s hundredth year; Emmylou Harris inducted him on 17 September 2025, and he sang “Guitar Town,” “Hillbilly Highway” and “Copperhead Road.” In 2026 he toured North America with a show called Fifty One Years of Songs and Stories, scheduled for more than seventy dates from February to November, and in August New West released “Volver A Celaya,” his first recording with Los Lobos, produced by the band’s Steve Berlin. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco, where he had played every year since 2002, scheduled a benefit concert in his honor for 1 October 2026.