Steve Earle On The Making of Terraplane Blues … And Then Some

I know you’re a big patron of Matt Umanov’s guitars [in Greenwich Village]. 

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I’m a big patron of guitar shops in general.

I understand you’re friends with Zeke Schein who works there. He’s a big Robert Johnson guy. 

Zeke knows more about this stuff than anybody that I know. I spent hours talking to him about this record. He knows what tuning all the songs are in. Zeke’s a really good player. He plays all that shit.

Do you think the general perception of blues these days is that it was just a form of folk music and that the dance element and the popular element of what blues used to be in the ‘30s and ‘40s has gotten lost?

Yeah, I mean that’s one thing – this record’s got a song that’s sort of based on “Smoke Stack Lightning.” And “Smoke Stack” – all those Chess records were jukebox records. They were made for people to dance to. They weren’t long and there wasn’t a lot of improvisation on them. They were improvising, but there wasn’t a shitload of long solos because they wrote two minute and 30 second records. And that’s represented here. But it very much sounds like this band. It’s the best band I’ve ever had. The existence of the band was part of the inspiration for making the record. Finally doing it had as much to do with Chris being in the band as anything else because I never had the guitar player to do it.

Did your time in New Orleans working on HBO’s Treme inform this album? 

Absolutely.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It” was actually taught to Hank Williams by that blues musician who’s from New Orleans.

“Tee Tot” [Rufus Payne] is the story … I don’t know how much there is [to all that] … there’s all those stories about how black music and white music … I don’t know. The legend says that Elvis got all those moves from watching black gospel groups and watching bands on Beale Street. I know where he got everything he got. It was from Wally Fowler. Wally Fowler was the founder of the Oak Ridge Boys. He was the first white gospel singer to perform the way that black gospel groups did. You know, to not just stand there. He was the first real showman in white gospel music and he founded the Oak Ridge Boys. And there’s been an Oak Ridge Boys ever since.

When Guitar Town was written I was writing for Sunberry/Dunbar [the publishing division of RCA], which belonged to the Oak Ridge Boys and was run by my publisher, Noel Fox, who was the last bass singer in a non-secular version of the Oak Ridge Boys. Oak Ridge Boys are a gospel group. And [Richard] Sterban took over. Sterban came from J.D. Sumner, who replaced Noel because Noel quit. Noel went out and worked for Olan Mills or something, you know, selling people pictures of themselves for years. When the Oaks got big they brought Noel back to run their publishing company. He was a great song man. He’s gone now, but there would be no Guitar Town without Noel. He told me to write an album and not worry whether or not it would get you a record deal, and I had just lost my first record deal after being here for 12 or 13 years. I was pretty discouraged, and didn’t have much faith in myself as a writer anymore. And I wrote the songs that became Guitar Town in about 11 months.

But I heard all the war stories from him and from the Oaks and from those guys during that period, and they set me straight on where Elvis got that shit, and I believe it’s true. It just makes more sense. I went back and found a couple of films of Wally Fowler performing and [I was like] “ohhh …”

But it took a while to get poor white people and poor black people at each other’s throats, and it didn’t always take. There was already someone who was interested, like upper middle class kids like Sam Phillips slummin’ just because they loved the music. He ended up starting Sun Records, that kind of stuff. So you know, it couldn’t stay contained forever, the two things. And Sam knew, and that’s not a legend. He looked for years and [said], “If I can find a white kid, a good looking white kid who can sing this stuff, then I’m going to get rich.” He didn’t get as rich as he should have, but he got rich.

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