Blues From the Country…

Occasional Albums Thing 065 - Steve Earle & The Dukes “Terraplane”

When it comes to “The Blues” (and we’re talking musical styles here and not Birmingham’s pre-eminent football team (we’re named after our City and not someone’s house…)) you can take your allegedly virtuoso white boys who claim to be Bluesmen (I’m looking at you Claptout, Mayall, Page and a litany of other middle class, seemingly mainly white British men who heard a Robert Johnson record in the early 60’s and proclaimed henceforth that they had “da Blues”) and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine. I prefer my Bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta or the Southside of Chicago, gnarly, wrinkled, (these days) old if they’re even still with us and Black. So why am I here listening to and enjoying a “Blues” album by a white adopted Texan (Steve Earle was born in Virginia but the first earth his feet touched was from Texas, carried around in a tin by his Daddy for just such an occasion !) ? Well I’m nothing if not a mess of contradictions !

Originally released in 2015 “Terraplane” is Steve Earle’s “Blues” album. Why would a Country music outlaw record a Blues album you may ask ? Maybe the news that he was going through his seventh divorce while he wrote and recorded these songs may begin to answer that question. As he says in the sleeve notes he knew he’d always do it when it was time and "Hell, everybody's sick of all my fucking happy songs anyway".

It kicks off with Blues in the way of distorted Harmonicas thru bullet microphones on “Baby Baby Baby (Baby)”; “You're The Best Lover That I Ever Had” has a rattling Dobro playing a vaguely Hubert Sumlin “Smokestack Lightning” style slinky guitar riff; Track 3 “The Tennessee Kid” is a direct descendant of “Warrior” from Earle’s 2004 album “The Revolution Starts Now”, a part sung, part spoken tale of the titular Kid going to the crossroads to pay his balance to the Devil “Hey, hey, hey hey, The balance comes due someday”.  This Blues is leaning more toward urban Chicago Blues’n’B than the Delta. 

Over on Side 2 “The Usual Time” has more than a taste of the Fabulous Thunderbirds about it; “Baby's Just As Mean As Me” is sung in duet with Dukes Fiddler Eleanor Whitman and stylistically reminds me of the theme tune from “Jeeves & Wooster”! “Gamblin’ Blues” is what I imagine is known as a Country Blues, fingerpicked Dobro and the woes of a gambler. The album comes to a close on the aptly boastful “King Of The Blues”, a languid yet braggadocious tale of “the last word in lonesome, the king of the Blues” born on the same day the last one died “‘cause there can only be one and I can’t be denied”. 

“Terraplane” isn’t all about da Blues, there are songs here that would find a comfortable home on regular Steve Earle records (“Ain't Nobody's Daddy Now”, “Go Go Boots Are Back”, “Better Off Alone” and “Acquainted With The Wind” fit that mould) but the Bluesy bits are a cool change of pace for Earle and he and the Dukes fake it just fine. All this fakery is delivered on transluscent orange vinyl and housed in another striking Tony Fitzpatrick sleeve design…man I’m gonna miss these things now he’s gone.

Here now endeth our run through my recently acquired Steve Earle records, there are more to get so we will return to Mr. Earle in time, and I hope you found something within them worth your time. This one ain’t gonna suddenly turn me into a fan of those pitiable white boys I listed earlier but at least Steve Earle is American, which is darn sight closer to the Blues than Claptout has ever been.

The Tennessee Kid - https://youtu.be/vfw004sPz5M?si=uKwsA6sGDbkRDxob