Is anyone more entitled to make a Townes Van Zandt covers album than Steve Earle, who named a son after the Texas singer-songwriter? As Van Zandt's protégé, Earle knows these songs intimately — some of the greatest in the folk-country canon — and delivers them with the ease of breathing, mostly unadorned. His voice lacks Van Zandt's sweet frailty, but it brings gruff tenderne...

Steve Earle learned the haunted ballads of the late, self-destructive Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt from the best possible source: Van Zandt himself. In the early Nineties, when Earle was battling a serious drug problem, Van Zandt showed up at Earle's house in Nashville to lend support. "He said, 'Do you use clean needles?'" Earle recalls. "I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Every day?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'OK, listen to this song I just wrote.' And he played me [the 1994 classic] 'Marie.' It...