Posts Tagged ‘Mr. Gold and Mr. Mudd’
Folk Wisdom: Steve Earle @ The National
The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room.
Earle’s speaking voice—deliberate, avuncular, devoid of pretense—sounds as though it was engineered for the specific purpose of perpetuating folk legends. When he says he got the idea for the tribute album when one night from his tour bus he saw Van Zandt’s ghost riding his old horse Amigo through the Colorado fog, you take him at his word. At Tuesday night’s show in Richmond, Earle deployed folk’s discursive oral tradition in the service of contextualizing Townes.
