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.

Earle had been “stalking” Van Zandt for awhile before they officially met, he explained, during a gig Earle was playing at a Texas dive in 1972. Townes, drunk, was loudly demanding that he play the folk standard “Wabash Cannonball,” a standard the 17-year-old Earle did not know. “He said, you call yerself a country singer and you don’t know Wabash cannonball?” At a loss, and upset at being upbraided by his unknowing hero, Earle launched into a Van Zandt song called “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a breathless gambling allegory punctuated with the final line,

This is what this story’s told
You feel like Mudd, you’ll end up Gold
You feel like lost, you’ll end up found
So amigo, lay them raises down.

Earle and Van Zandt each played both Mudd and Gold over the course of their lives and careers, imbuing their relationship with the sort of solidarity and candor that made possible the sort of confrontation they had at Earle’s house in the 1980s, when Earle was taking a beating from a heroin habit.

“I had a home at the time,” said Earle. “But there weren’t anything in it. I pull up into my driveway one day and there’s Townes’s truck, and I’m like ‘Oh, boy.’ I knew I was in trouble, getting a lecture on temperance from Townes Van Zandt. He goes, ‘You look like shit.’ I go, ‘I know.’ He says, ‘How’s yer arm?’ I look down and say, ‘Not too good’ … Townes takes out his guitar and says, ‘I wanna play you something I wrote a few days ago.’”

Earle then made like Townes did then and began picking a dark tune called “Marie,” which chronicles the deeply unromantic plight of a drifter-musician couple clawing for dignity in a world that wants to distance itself from them as much as they want to distance themselves from it.

Introducing the songs with these personal anecdotes recruited us into the cradle of Earle’s memory and allowed us to all but shake hands with Townes–to touch his empathy (“Townes was notorious for bringing homeless people home .. then when he didn’t have a home, he brought them home to other people’s homes”), his mischievousness, and his sadness. It made us feel as though we had more at stake in each song, making certain lyrics—such as this one from “To Live is to Fly”—to land a little deeper in the chest:

Everything is not enough
And nothin’ is too much to bear
Where you’ve been is good and gone
All you keep’s the getting there

It was a night for poignant, lyrics-driven folk, as Greenbelt native Joe Pug set off Earle’s weary wisdom with the angsty passion of his opening set. I had been deeply intrigued by Pug since hearing his debut EP a few weeks ago, and I spent some time with him after his set; details in tomorrow's post.

Country musician Steve Earle once famously pronounced Townes Van Zandt "the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." So how come the only people who ever give Townes his propers are his contemporaries and the odd independent filmmaker? Maybe because even when started started writing iconic country-folk standards, he stayed holed up in a tin-roofed shack outside Houston, planting flowers and playing to dive crowds. Maybe because his songs usually only became famous after being covered by other, more entrepreneurial country stars. Or maybe because his ambling melodies have been ground to grains beneath the tire treads of the endless Chevy commercial that is modern country music.

Earle has not forgotten Townes, though; and he's doing his best to make sure the rest of us don't either. His latest LP, Townes, is a 15-song memorial to his mentor. The album revisits some of Townes' most characteristic tunes–including "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold," which was the first Van Zandt song Earle ever played (he did it the night they first officially met, to stop Townes from heckling him), and "To Live is to Fly," enduring ballad that doubles as the late singer's epitaph.

The album's most poignant tribute comes at the beginning, with "Pancho and Lefty." "Pancho and Lefty" is a heartbreaking song about a pariah who sets out with his faithful sidekick in pursuit of a vagabond dream. Pancho is a mischievous but ultimately good-natured bandito, who "wears his gun outside his pants for all the honest world to feel." The federales pity him and indulge him his fantasy, until Pancho is finally killed on the high sands of Mexico–"Nobody heard his dying words, that's just the way it goes"–and Lefty is forced to flee to the unromantic bosom of Ohio. For Van Zandt, the manic-depressive heir to an oil fortune who underwent shock treatment as a young man and sought to escape his demons by becoming a rambler, the song has definite strains of autobiography. The sadness of the song is deeply personal. Ironically, "Pancho and Lefty" became popular only after Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered it in the '80s.

With the exception of "Lungs"–a diabolical little tune he spices up with a voice filter, digital drums, and what sounds like turntable-scratching–Earle declines to stray far from Van Zandt's original arrangements. The most distinct difference, aside from the clearer sound and the occasional variation on the finger-picking, is Earle's voice. Where Townes possessed an eminently mild timbre, Earle's instrument is more nasal, occasionally gravelly, and tends to grip each word with his more-pronounced drawl as if wringing sweat from a handkerchief.

By comparison, this affect might seem indulgent. But it is plainly love, not vanity, that is the driving force behind this album. Earle, 11 years Townes' junior, idolized the man, even giving his son, Justin, "Townes" for a middle name. Covers are often about reinventing a song–celebrating new styles by bending old forms. Townes, on the other hand, is not so much a seizure of inheritance as a loving genuflection at the headstone of a master. It is Lefty promising Pancho that his last words will be heard, after all.