Earle: ‘My strength is a yarn’

May 29, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Barry Gilbert

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS

Describing Steve Earle’s “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” as a story about a skid-row junkie abortionist haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams may work as a dust-jacket blurb. But it doesn’t begin to reveal the depth of the singer-songwriter’s debut novel.

Earle, 56, is a political activist, actor and Grammy-winning musician who helped revitalize country music in the mid-’80s and is a leader in the Americana/folk genre today. He has created a fascinating and entertaining novel that is honest, dark and unforgiving in its detailed portrayal of abortion and addiction, two areas of which Earle writes from experience. But its overlying themes of faith and spirituality leave the reader uplifted and hopeful.

He recently called in to talk about the book during a lunch break in Houston, where he was doing in-store performances to promote his new CD, which bears the same title as the book.

“I know what my strength is, and my strength is a yarn,” said Earle, who built his reputation on story songs. “I wrote ‘Tom Ames’ Prayer’ and ‘Ben McCulloch’ by the time I was 19 or 20. So everything I knew about writing was about getting it said really concisely and really quickly and getting a lot of information input into people’s brains in a really short period of time.”

But after the success in 2003 of “Doghouse Roses,” a collection of his short stories, his publisher wanted a full-length novel. Thus began eight years of work on “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” which his editor suggested be based on some legend surrounding music. The book, however, is not about music.

“I’d always heard that there was a doctor traveling with Hank Williams when he died who mysteriously wasn’t there when the police came,” Earle said. “The doctor was with him when they left Knoxville, but when he was found dead in the back of his car and the police were summoned, they got there and there was no one there but the driver and Hank, deceased in the back seat.”

By the time Earle discovered that the person who had been with Williams was not a doctor at all, he already had created the character of Doc Ebersole, a physician who had developed a taste for morphine, lost his license and fed his habit by performing abortions and patching up the inhabitants on the seamy side of San Antonio. Doc sees the country legend’s ghost, has long conversations with him and is haunted by the idea that he had provided Williams’fatal dose.