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

You’ve got a history of borrowing from the blues lexicon in your own tunes. And you taught that course at the Old Town School of Folk Music years ago, I think it was titled “The Cool Shit To Steal.” How do you walk that line between borrowing from traditional material and coming up with original stuff? You know, so much of the folk tradition is obviously about borrowing. 

It is, but in the blues it’s really tricky because it’s a limited genre. Some of this stuff is definitely post-Bob Dylan blues. Dylan started making blues records on purpose a long time ago. It begins on Bringing It All Back Home and it’s fully realized on Highway 61. Everything is in a blues form from that point on for a while, until probably Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding maybe. And I thought that it would be sort of fun to do something where I didn’t necessarily have to come up with a lot of melodies, that I would find at least the components for the melodies in this toolbox that’s called the blues.

Some of it’s more original that I thought it would be, melodically. The lyrics I pushed as hard as I’ve ever pushed. Some of the best lyrics I’ve ever written are on this record. I wrote a spoken word piece in iambic pentameter again. That’s me making up for my lack of education. I didn’t get a chance to write in iambic pentameter in high school because I only got halfway through the 9^th grade.

So are you still a big Shakespeare buff?

Yeah. I don’t think that the glovemaker’s son wrote those plays, but yeah. I think Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, wrote them. So does the greatest Shakespearean actor of our time, so did Mark Twain, so does Meryl Streep.

I don’t know if I believe that. Is there evidence?

There’s tons of evidence. There’s evidence both ways. You should read all the books and make up your own mind about it. There’s no way it was a bunch of people. It was one person, in my mind, and it pisses Billy Bragg off because he thinks I’m being elitist, and I’m far from an elitist.

There’s no way [it was] someone who’d never been to Italy, was illiterate, or in other words couldn’t form words, and that’s probably true of Shakespeare and most actors of his time. He could read but he couldn’t write, because that was a much harder thing to learn to do then. He had no intimate knowledge of life at court, and didn’t have political protection to keep him from getting his fucking head chopped off with some of the things he was parodying and some of the things he was writing about when he was writing them.

So the theory about de Vere is that he was either Elizabeth’s son or Elizabeth’s lover. Some people even think both. My guess is that he was her son, or somehow related to her, anyway. And so he got away with it. But it’s one person, it’s a singular genius voice. There’s no way it was more than one person, no way there was more than one person that brilliant in Elizabethan England, when there were only a 100,000 people in London and the whole area. It just doesn’t make sense.

Like with Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their voices were so different from the Shakespeare plays, there’s just no way …

Yeah, and Ben Jonson is where a lot of the clues that it may have been de Vere come from. Ben Jonson wrote the preface to the First Folio, he’s the one who called him “The Soul Of The Age” and all that stuff. And they all were writing really great stuff, but nobody was writing anything like that. And nobody really emulated him in his time. Shortly after he died people did. And he became a big deal – Shakespeare’s plays were being staged and they were hits in London. And at that moment Elizabeth was patronizing theater. She didn’t go out to the theater, she couldn’t do that, but plays were brought in and performed at court. And she was the very first monarch in Europe that did that, which is another clue.

But there are a lot of books about it, and there’s a lot of evidence, and people are horrified of it. There’s a film called Anonymous that’s about the authorship and it’s just a shoot-em-up. Every theory is about Edward de Vere being the actual William Shakespeare, and who the real William Shakespeare was, and why he got set up. I think it’s really simple. I think he had to have a front because he was the Earl of Oxford and he couldn’t be a playwright, so I think he just set up a guy and paid him, because Shakespeare retired and went back to his hometown and set himself up in a wool business and fucking sold wool for the rest of his life after becoming the greatest playwright and actor of his age. It just doesn’t make sense.

He was a hoarder too; he hoarded grain during the plague, which was a bad thing to do. 

Yeah, he was a businessman. That’s what he was. He was a Republican. But yeah, I believe that.