Steve Earle — San Antonio / Schertz, Texas

Steve Earle grew up primarily in Schertz, Texas — a small community outside San Antonio in Guadalupe County — after his birth at Fort Monroe, Virginia on 17 January 1955. His father was a civilian air traffic controller and the family moved around before settling in the San Antonio area, where Earle spent his teenage years absorbing Texas music and developing the restless ambition that would drive him toward Nashville at the age of nineteen. The Texas environment — its country, blues, and folk traditions, and the specific Austin scene that was emerging in the early 1970s — shaped Earle's musical sensibility as much as Nashville did when he arrived there.

Earle came of age musically at the moment when the outlaw country movement was challenging Nashville's slick production values, and he had direct contact with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark — two of the movement's foundational songwriters — who became mentors and models. Van Zandt in particular was a formative influence: Earle has spoken repeatedly about the relationship, and the shadow of Van Zandt's approach — honest, literate, uncompromising — is audible in Earle's songwriting throughout his career. Clark and Van Zandt represented an alternative to the Nashville music industry's commercial imperatives, and their influence pushed Earle toward a songwriting seriousness that eventually produced 'Guitar Town' (1986), one of the most celebrated country albums of the decade.

Schertz is a suburban community northeast of San Antonio on Interstate 35, and there is no formal Steve Earle heritage marker in the town. Earle's relationship to Texas is one of origin and temperament rather than of specific locations: the state gave him his musical formation and his sense of what serious American music could be, and he has maintained connections to the Texas music world throughout his career despite spending much of his adult life in Nashville and New York.