Willie Nelson – Memphis Flyer

Steve Earle is a country-rock singer with an attitude, both poetic and angry, perceptive and stark, often in the same song. Having just released his 16th album, So You Wannabe an Outlaw, he’s hit the road and will be in Memphis on Saturday. As I’d always been impressed with Earle’s dexterity at injecting political awareness into his songs, the lack of lyrics about the current state of our union in his first post-Trump release came as a bit of a surprise. Naturally, that was the first thing I asked him about.

The Memphis Flyer: You’ve often expressed a level of political awareness in your music that you don’t often hear from other country-rockers, but I don’t get that as much from the new record.

Steve Earle: Well, I try to find the human part of it — to tell stories and create characters that are affected by the things that I see happening politically. And I still write political songs. I wrote one for Joan Baez, for her record she’s working on with Joe Henry right now. But this record I just made because I was reconnecting to where I came in when I got to Nashville in 1974. That became interesting to me musically for a lot of reasons. Basically, I wrote the songs not knowing that this [presidency] was gonna happen, and then the election happened in November. It was literally three weeks later that we started the record. And I thought about scuttling it and writing some new songs quickly and making it more political. But I said, You know what? Let’s just let this record be what it is.

I supported Bernie Sanders, until he was out of the race, and then I voted for Hillary Clinton. I went on stage November 8th, thinking the worst that was gonna happen was Hillary Clinton being president of the United States, which … we know what that is, and it would have been the first woman to be president of the United States. And I came off stage, and we had elected the first orangutan to be president of the United States. So I just wasn’t prepared for that. I guess you can let diversity go too far sometimes.

So this record is inspired by the first days of Outlaw Country?

I kinda have this unique perspective on the term “Outlaw.” I’m from Texas. I was at the Dripping Springs Reunion — I bought tickets; about that time, all of the sudden Willie Nelson moves back, and Doug Sahm moves back, which a lot of people forget about. And it was Doug who suggested to Willie that he play [Austin counterculture hot spot] Armadillo World Headquarters. Doug introduced Willie to Jerry Wexler, and that’s how Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages got made. And then Waylon Jennings hears those records.

Those guys figured out that rock acts had artistic freedom they didn’t have. And that’s what Outlaw’s about; it’s not about getting f*cked up. Look, George Jones was not going to a liquor store at 4:30 in the morning on a lawn mower. There aren’t any liquor stores open in Tennessee at 4:30 in the morning. He was going someplace else, to get something else. Country singers have always taken drugs, all that shit. But these guys wanted to make records the way they wanted to, that’s why they got called Outlaws.

Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes is one of my very favorite records. And that record sounds like it does because Waylon got to do what he wanted to do. It’s all built around his electric guitar. And this new record is built around me on the back pickup of a Fender Telecaster. It’s full of great guitar tones.

It’s a 1955 Telecaster through an AC50 [Vox amp]. And then Chris [Masterson] is playing a lot of baritone guitar on this record, a Collings baritone that he used. This record is a connection to the past, but it’s also the future. It’s new a musical direction. I love this band, this configuration with Ricky Ray Jackson on steel and Brad Pemberton on drums. The rest of the band [including Masterson, Kelly Looney on bass, and Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle] has been together for a long time and Ricky’s come along and made it hit this other level. And I’m really interested in that musically, so. … Now we’ll be on tour, and I’ll start writing songs for this band. And the next record will be just as country as this one, and way more political, is my guess.

Steve Earle and the Dukes play Minglewood Hall Saturday, July 8th, at 8 p.m., with opening band The Mastersons.

The singer/songwriter genre is one we think we know well. As a friend quipped recently, “I guess it’s time to go hear a white guy with an acoustic guitar sing about his feelings.” But the genre cliches don’t apply when it comes to veteran songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard.

Gaining notoriety over 40 years ago when he penned “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” — a sardonic character study, now ranked among the top 100 country songs by Rolling Stone magazine — Hubbard was instantly recognized as a writer of humor and wit, often grouped with the “outlaws” who were redefining country music at the time. But while the humor and wit are still very much with him, Hubbard’s sound has grown in unpredictable ways.

“I started off in folk music,” Hubbard told me. “Then there was that whole outlaw, progressive country sound. Then the movie Urban Cowboy came along and just screwed everything up, and it wasn’t about the music, it was about the scene.”

Nonetheless, Hubbard worked in that vein well into the 1980s, in the hedonistic spirit of an outlaw troubadour. But it all came to a head when Stevie Ray Vaughan convinced him to get sober. With this sea change, he not only took to the craft of songwriting with renewed determination, he rediscovered the blues.

“Before I got clean and sober, I felt very fortunate to have seen Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb over the years. But I never got into playing the guitar like that. So in my 40s, I started to really absorb those things they were doing, that dead-thumb style, that groove thing. First I learned to finger pick, then I learned open tunings, then I got a slide.” Laying dormant for a few years, Hubbard reemerged in the early 1990s, and each successive album incorporated more country blues. By the early 2000s, that sound had become deeply ingrained in his songwriting. “Right now, it’s a real good marriage,” he says, “to have that foundation in folk music, where the lyrics are important, but then to lay that over a dead-thumb, low-down groove. To have a little bit more than just ‘I woke up this morning, the blues squattin’ on my face’ kinda thing.”

Hubbard’s stylistic reboot reflects a debt to the Delta that he is quick to acknowledge. “The whole Mississippi thing, Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, all those cats, just — God, man!” Titles from The Ruffian’s Misfortune, from 2015, pay homage to both “Mr. Musselwhite” and Jessie Mae Hemphill, aka the She-Wolf. “Oh God, Jessie Mae, I just adore her. Hopefully some young person will hear that song and find her and just fall in love, like I did.”

But beyond the growing influence of the blues, in all its permutations, Hubbard’s music can’t be pinned down to a single genre. He may also dip into Appalachian folk or honky tonk, even revving up into full-on rock-and-roll. Two tracks from 2012’s The Grifter’s Hymnal feature piano work from Ian McLagan of Small Faces fame, and, as he says, “When he started playing, I teared up. I actually started crying.”
Hubbard honored another blues-ified Brit on that record, with a cover of Ringo Starr’s “Coochy Coochy.” When Starr heard it, as Hubbard notes, “He said, ‘The drums are good on it! How ’bout if I sing?’ So we sent him the track, and when it came back, I thought, ‘I wonder if he doubled his vocal, like the Beatles?’ — and he did!”

When he started out, Hubbard never could have predicted working with one of the Fab Four. “I was more of a desert-boot-and-corduroy kinda guy, rather than the Beatle boots, at the time.” But such were the rewards of following his own star. He has remained staunchly eclectic, especially since releasing albums on Bordello Records, managed by his wife Judy. “She says, you write about Les Pauls or strippers or snake farms, or whatever you want, and I’ll try to sell the damn thing,” says Hubbard. “I feel very fortunate, you know, that I’m sleeping with the president of my record label.”
Ray Wylie Hubbard plays Lafayette’s Music Room on April 20th.