“I Was Just the Kid That Showed Up”: Steve Earle on Jerry Jeff and Learning from Its Namesake

One of the rare, decidedly unexpected upsides of the pandemic has been the surreal fluidity of time. With 9-5 clock-punching becoming a thing of the past for many of us, it was easy for days to slip into nights and vice versa, so seamlessly that you could easily find yourself wide awake at 3 a.m., hypnotically scrolling through countless random cable channels or streaming services, in search of something new to watch. And until you end up drifting through the truly strange late-night possibilities, you never really know what long-buried cinematic gem you might uncover. True visual oddities like director James Szalapski’s curious musical documentary from 1976, Heartworn Highways, which has been popping up lately at hours when most of us used to be peacefully asleep. Some might have seen it; many have not, and it’s not an easy movie to explain.

There is no real linear plot to Heartworn Highways, outside of following once-incarcerated country renegade David Allan Coe as he drives his own tour bus to the Tennessee State Prison, where he plays a quirky but convivial concert for inmates. But it’s the other footage that Szalinski gathers along the way that’s simply magical, capturing the Texas Outlaw Country movement in its infancy, via: a young Guy Clark, plying his trade as a luthier; Townes Van Zandt, spinning yarns like a talk show host on his bucolic farm; other upstarts like Steve Young, Rodney Crowell and even Charlie Daniels, playing a high school, and then, later in the inexplicably sequenced clips, a spider-limbed young disciple of that songwriting school, his long hair practically obscuring his face and a cigarette dangling Ron-Wood-dangerously from his lips—future Grammy winner Steve Earle, 21 at the time, playing his own early material like “Elijah’s Church,” but obviously in reverent awe of his mentors. He might be sitting at the same Nashville kitchen table with the late legend Clark and company in the scene, and sharing the same bottle of inspirational booze (“Now that’s vodka!” he rasps after a swig, before leading a seasonal singalong of the traditional “Silent Night”), but it’s clear that he’s paying studious attention. Because you just don’t get access to those kinds of teachers anymore.

Why did his elders accept this neophyte, warmly welcome him and take him in? Earle’s still not sure. “But I think part of it was, I was persistent, and I probably wouldn’t let ’em ignore me,” he reckons. “So I think they had to admire that, because they had to do that, too, to get where they were at the time. And another part of it was, Townes tended to put me through more hoops, because he was pretty hard on himself—he was his own worst enemy, in many ways. And with Guy, it was more of a direct apprenticeship, because you could ask him questions and get a straight answer. Whereas Townes would give you a copy of [Dee Brown’s] Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and tell you to go read it. But Jerry Jeff was just Jerry Jeff—he was good at what he did, and he knew he was Jerry Jeff Walker. But when he ran across something he liked, he championed it.” And Clark, in turn, picked up said trait from him, he believes. “Because Guy literally bugged Pat Carter to death until he signed me to my first publishing deal, at Sunbury Dunbar, so I wrote for the same place Guy did. So it was just one of those things—I was just the kid that showed up.”

And in the process, the 20-something Earle, now 67, learned respect for The Song and its practitioners, and it shows on the soundtrack, his first-known recordings. And long after he broke into the alt-country business with his definitive Guitar Town debut from 1986, he went on to pay dutiful tribute via collections of covers that tipped the hat to his crucial tutors, who look barely out of their teens themselves in Heartworn Highways (an expanded DVD edition of which features bonus scenes of him crooning “Darlin’ Commit Me,” “Mercenary Song,” and—with another young up-and-comer at the time, Rodney Crowell—“Stay a Little Longer”). First came the Clark-honoring Guy in 2009, then Townes 10 years later, the third entry in Earle’s trilogy, Jerry Jeff, his 22nd overall. It’s a 10-track nod to another telling musical influence, Jerry Jeff Walker, a New York-reared folkie who settled in Austin, began running with cutting-edge tunesmiths like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, but succumbed to throat cancer in 2020 at 78 (Van Zandt died in 1997, Clark in 2016). And although Walker doesn’t figure into Heartworn, the obscure old film and freshly cut new album nicely complement each other. They capture a bygone era when composers considered their craft to be some sort of alchemy, and a perfect song to be worth its emotional weight in gold.

Thinking back on his youthful mid-’70s days on Music Row, the San Antonio-raised Earle gets wistful. He’d first discovered Walker at 14, when his high school drama teacher gave him a copy of the artist’s classic “Mr. Bojangles,” which Earle covers on Jerry Jeff, along with “Gettin’ By,” “Little Bird,” “My Old Man” and “Hill Country Rain,” the tune he chose to perform at a life-celebrating concert last year in Luckenbach, Texas, organized by Walker’s widow, Susan, alongside fellow fans Emmylou Harris and Jimmy Buffett. The whimsical “Mr. Bojangles” not only caught the kid’s attention, but also gave him something to aspire to. And soon he was living in Nashville, palling around with other scrappy hopefuls like John Hiatt, and testing out originals at smoky coffeehouses. It might be tough to picture, but he actually sported a beat-up black cowboy hat back then, with a beaded band, which was what initially caught Clark’s eye in a club. “He just walked over and said, ‘I really like your hat,’ and that was the first conversation that we ever had,” Earle drawls, chuckling. Next thing he knew, he was playing bass in the man’s band, co-writing with him, and then helping him record his landmark Old No. 1 debut in ’75.

The newcomer also began working with Van Zandt. But he makes clear the fact that Walker was always his first and foremost stylistic influence. He wanted to be Walker, he swears, and he grew his hair appropriately hippie-cosmic long. Walker, in turn, came to trust Earle enough to make him his designated driver, ensuring he got home safely each libidinous night spent on the town. The disciple watched the master casually hitchhike to various distant gigs; he did the same, admittedly somewhat naively, and occasionally found himself in some scary situations. “And yeah, it happened—if you hitched as much as I did, it happens,” he says. “I ran away from home when I was 14, and I had some people tell me once, ‘Hey, kid! Get out here and ask for directions!’” He sighs, somberly. “I fell for it. And they drove away with my guitar. So hitchhiking wasn’t for everybody, but it was for Jerry Jeff, and it was for me, and it was for Townes at one time, too. I don’t think Guy ever hitchhiked anywhere—Guy always had a VW that ran, and the rest of us didn’t. And Jerry Jeff actually toured on a motorcycle for a few years. It was a Harley-Davidson, and whenever it broke down, he would hitchhike.”