Earle’s debut album, Guitar Town, was his breakthrough. The album-opening title track is rich with a furiously strummed acoustic guitar, electric guitars twanging Duane Eddy–style, a steady humming B3 organ, and a propulsive rhythm section fueling Earle’s swaggering recollection of the ... 

 Exit 0 picked up right where Guitar Town left off, with “Nowhere Road,” a story of a desolate Oklahoma road that serves as a metaphor for policies designed to keep the disenfranchised in their place while seeming to hold out the prospect of opportunity ahead.  

 But it’s only a prelude to the masterwork of Earle’s MCA years, Copperhead Road. Released in 1988, it was the most powerful example of the rock-influenced spectrum of the New Traditionalist movement, which was then cresting commercially in the wake of the mainstream breakthroughs of Dwight Yo... 

 Earle has released numerous live albums and anthologies. The Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator performance marked the end of his MCA tenure, but Live at the BBC is a better document from the same period.  

 Small wonder that Earle couldn’t top Copperhead Road with its follow-up, The Hard Way. It’s not as consistently inspired as its predecessor, but in a few spots its every bit as potent. The surging, dense atmospherics of “The Other Kind” are an ideal complement to the lyrics’ story of an... 

 In 1993, MCA released its official Steve Earle overview, The Essential Steve Earle, a 13-track collection that includes “Guitar Town,” “The Devil’s Right Hand,” “Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’ Tough),” “Copperhead Road,” and “Nowhere Road,” as well as two non-album cuts, the truc... 

 He eventually released Train a Comin’ on the Winter Harvest label in 1995. In an all-acoustic affair, Earle is accompanied by two unassailable masters of stringed instruments, Norman Blake and Peter Rowan, plus the formidable acoustic bass player Roy Hus key (now deceased), and on harmony vocal... 

 Hip-O’s double-CD, 28-track Ain’t Ever Satisfied: The Steve Earle Collection, includes six songs from Copperhead Road and “The Other Kind” from The Hard Way.  

 Earle’s next album, I Feel Alright, is both a spit-in-the-eye retort to those who wrote him off and a return to his crisp, country-rock style, with harmonicas, twangy guitars, and a powerhouse rhythm section.  

 El Corazón features a full-blown, bluegrass number, “I Still Carry You Around,” teaming Earle with one of bluegrass music’s finest groups, the Del McCoury Band.  

 Thus was the stage set his 1999 collaboration with that band, The Mountain, a masterful bluegrass album that features stirring tracks such as “Harlan Man.”  

 Bluegrass is a distant memory on Transcendental Blues, which opens with a synthesizer blip, harmonium drones and the faint patter of tabla on the title track, and features other Beatles-inspired touches such as backward orchestral riffing on “The Boy Who Never Cried” and serpentine guitar lic... 

 Owing to the controversy sparked by “John Walker’s Blues”–a song written from the perspective of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh–the whole of Jerusalem was never fairly addressed. It arrived not with a statement supportive of terrorists–as some conservative critics claimed–... 

 A between-albums stopgap, Sidetracks is billed as “a collection of unreleased or underexposed songs.”  

 Just an American Boy was captured smack in the middle of the controversy over “John Walker's Blues,” and while it finds Earle talking about politics as much as playing, it somehow works without becoming too preachy. 

 The two Live from Austin sets come from Earle's appearances on “Austin City Limits” in 1986 and 2000, respectively.  

 With the same core band he used on Jerusalem–guitarist Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, former dB's drummer Will Rigby, and bassist Kelly Looney–Earle upped the ante considerably on The Revolution Starts... Now, a classic, Phil Ochs–style protest album that doesn't let up once in its 11 t... 

 A more comprehensive document of his early years and comeback is The Definitive Collection 1983-1997, which begins before his signing to MCA and takes him through El Corazón.  

 Live at Montreux 2005 is a solid, all-acoustic affair. 

 After Revolution, Earle signed to New West Records, married country-folk singer Allison Moorer and, tiring of the political conservatism of the South, moved to New York City. He documents all of that on Washington Square Serenade, from his anger at his old home (“Tennessee Blues,” in which he... 

 The two Live from Austin sets come from Earle's appearances on “Austin City Limits” in 1986 and 2000, respectively.  

 Earle has released numerous live albums and anthologies. The Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator performance marked the end of his MCA tenure, but Live at the BBC is a better document from the same period.  

 Townes is a loving, but not totally successful tribute to one of Earle's early mentors, the late Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt. Earle re-imagines the songs using sometimes inventive production (“Lungs”), but his gruff vocal delivery tends to rob songs like “Loretta” and “Rake�...