Saint Of Lost Causes

Hardcore troubadour Justin Townes Earle left us on August 20.

“I was a junkie, so I know about struggle.”

ALTHOUGH HE’LL always be bracketed with his father Steve Earle, Justin Townes Earle was one of the few musical offspring to approach matching his more famous parent artistically. When he died of a suspected drug overdose in Nashville, aged just 38, Earle Jr left behind eight albums that mixed the long-planted roots of ragtime and bluegrass with modern country and folk, digging deep into his troubled life for inspiration.

Always determined not be his father’s son, musically at least, Earle’s early albums still seemed to measure himself against his heritage. But it wasn’t necessary. When he released the self-explanatory twin albums Single Mothers

(2014) and Absent Fathers (2015) it seemed to purge that need from his songwriting, and his final album, 2019’s The Saint Of Lost

Causes, took a more widescreen look at life on the wrong side of America’s tracks, revealing a social conscience that was subtler than his father, but just as strong. Born on January 4, 1982 and partially named for Steve’s mentor Townes Van Zandt, Earle was just two years old when his father left home. His mother, Carol Ann Hunter, was the third of Earle Sr’s seven wives. Justin’s childhood with his mother was so unstable that at 12 he left to live with his father, himself only recently released from prison for possession of drugs and firearms. Troubled by ADHD, his issues with substance abuse began soon after – he first shot heroin aged 12 – and he rapidly became a hardened addict. “I was a junkie, so I know about struggle,” he told MOJO in 2009.

Earle went in and out of rehab, and in 2000 was infamously sacked from his father’s band after nodding out while putting bright red Manic Panic dye in his hair (it cost $10,000 to repaint and carpet the formerly all-white room). A relapse in 2010 saw Earle jailed overnight after a fight with a nightclub owner, and in 2016 he admitted to actively following a marijuana maintenance programme.

“Sobriety to me means I don’t shoot heroin and cocaine together,” he told Rolling Stone in 2019.

“[I smoke] a lot of weed. A quarterounce a day.”

In the tributes after his death, musicians talked of Earle’s generosity and kindness. Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain, who toured twice with Earle in the US, said he “always treated me kindly… he understood struggle, he understood joy… I saw him at the peaks and valleys of both”.

Earle wasn’t just kind in spirit, however. It wasn’t unknown for him to peel off a couple of hundred bucks and just hand them to his support act for walking around money. He’s survived by his wife, Jenn Marie, and two-year-old daughter Etta. A public memorial is planned in 2021.

Andy Fyfe