I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive/Steve Earle

Steve Earle wears more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins: Singer and songwriter, of course, but also actor (The Wire, Meme), activist, and author (Doghouse Roses, a collection of short stories published in 2001). Last week he released a new album called I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. This week, his first novel comes out--also called I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

The title for both projects comes from a song by Hank Williams--one of the last singles the country singer released before he died in 1953. (Interestlingly, Earle does not cover the song on the new album.) A spectral Williams appears in Earle's novel, haunting the main character, Doc Ebersole, a disgraced physician who was among the last people to see Williams alive and may have provided the morphine dose that killed him. The novel takes place around the time of JFK's assassination and finds Doc living on the seedy side San Antonio. No longer allowed to practice medicine, and a morphine addict himself, he gets by performing abortions. Then a young woman named Graciela comes seeking his services, and changes his life--for she is able to miraculously heal with the touch of her hand.

Shared title aside, there is no hard-and-fast connection between novel and album except that, according to Earle, they address similar themes. In a recent interview with Publishers Weekly he was asked if the album was a companion piece to the book. Earle said:

Normally I know what I'm going to call an album when I start recording it. There's a title track or I have a bone to pick. This time I didn't. I was just writing the best songs I could write. I recorded it in five days with T Bone Burnett. When I got it all done, I thought, "Oh my God, this album is about the same fucking thing the book is about." It ended up being about mortality, an experience we all have to go through. Not a final experience. Not necessarily a period, but a comma.

In an interview with The Telegraph in the U.K., Earle said that it took him about eight years to write the novel, "in six or eight separate marches." Earle also talked about his own reading preferences: "I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know. But I loved the Harry Potter books." He cites Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter as another favorite and a big influence on his own novel. He also tends to go back to the fiction he loved as a child, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. "Fiction is what I read least and then it tends to take the place of drugs," Earle says. "I get addicted and go back to things like Tolkien"

See Steve Earle discussing his new album and novel here.

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive (Kindle Edition)
Doghouse Roses (Kindle Edition)
Coming Through Slaughter (Kindle Edition)

For the Anniversary of Gettysburg: Dixieland/Steve Earle

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought 147 years ago this week, July 1-3, 1863.  It produced the largest number of casualties of any battle of the Civil War, and is considered a turning point in that conflict because it represented the "high-water mark" for the Confederacy--the northernmost point the South reached before being turned back by the Union Army.

Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, published in 1974, meticulously recreates the battle through the thoughts, actions, and impressions of the men who took part. Though his treatment is fictional, Shaara strove for scrupulous accuracy (his book served as the basis for Ted Turner's epic 1993 film Gettysburg).  All of the major characters in the book are historical figures, with one exception--Private Buster Kilrain, an Irishman serving under Col. Joshua Chamberlain in the 20th Regiment of Infantry, Maine Volunteers.  Kilrain is the only fictional character in The Killer Angels, and his surname appears to be derived from the book's title. 

Kilrain turns up in Steve Earle's song Dixieland, from his 1999 album The Mountain, recorded with the Del McCoury Band.  As Earle himself put it:  "I stole this character from the late Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, the best Civil War novel I've ever read."  Earle captures Kilrain's spirit and his devotion to his commanding officer:

I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and we fight for Chamberlain

'Cause he stood right with us when the Johnnies came like a banshee on the wind

When the smoke cleared out of Gettysburg many a mother wept

For many a good boy died there, sure, and the air smelted just like death

Earle's lyric also paraphrases at least one line directly from the text of the novel:  I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and I damn all gentlemen.  In the book Kilrain tells Chamberlain: "I'm Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen."

Earle did take some liberties with the character, however.  Writing about the song in The Civil War in American Culture, Will Kaufman notes:  "Earle gives Kilrain a striking political history not written into the novel: fleeing County Clare under a British death sentence for Fenianism, he arrives in America to join Joshua Chamberlain's Twentieth Maine Regiment."  Michael Shaara's son Jeff provided a somewhat different background for Kilrain (for one thing, he comes from Belfast) in a 1996 follow-up novel called Gods and Generals, which serves as a prequel to The Killer Angels.

Earle's song also suggests that Kilrain survives the Battle of Gettysburg, as Kaufman notes:  "After Gettysburg, Kilrain prepares to march on 'Dixieland' with the vengeance of a John Brown."  In fact, Buster Kilrain dies in The Killer Angels on July 3rd, 1863, from wounds sustained during the action at Little Round Top.

The Killer Angels (Kindle Edition)