Music review: Steve Earle and Roseanne Reid, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Both rootsy, storytelling songwriters whose work contains timeless human qualities, Steve Earle and Roseanne Reid make a good pairing, writes David Pollock

Steve Earle and Roseanne Reid, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh ****

Towards the end of his own set, Nashville country rock veteran Steve Earle paused for a moment to remember his first encounter with his support act, Dundee-based singer-songwriter Roseanne Reid.

It came during one of his songwriting camps for young musicians in the US, where she turned up as a teenager ill-prepared for the camping experience. Yet when she began playing, he knew she was something special – this was even before he knew that her father is the Proclaimers’ Craig Reid.

Across their separate solo acoustic sets, Reid and Earle made a nice pairing as rootsy, storytelling songwriters whose careers started generations apart, yet whose work contains shared human qualities which are timeless.

Earle, of course, is the one with the 40-year career and huge reputation behind him. Sporting grey denims, waistcoat and beard, the 68-year-old opened on the Pogues’ If I Should Fall from Grace with God, paying tribute to Shane MacGowan as “one of the best songwriters on the planet.” It adapted perfectly to his grizzled but soulful style, as heard on his own The Devil’s Right Hand, My Old Friend the Blues and the rousing Someday.

Earle’s music is entwined with his own persona, as a worldly, seven-times married recovering heroin addict, and his songs and words are rooted in experience. He introduced Goodbye as about “the same girl, but a different harmonica… some girls are just better for songs than others.” Yet at least he admitted, leading into Sparkle & Shine, that all his songs about women are really about him.

A diptych of South Nashville Blues and CCKMP (it stands for “cocaine can you kill my pain?”) detailed the highs and lows of his own drug addiction, and a hugely emotional cover of his son Justin Townes Earle’s Harlem River Blues paid tribute to his eldest son, whose drug-related death occurred in 2020.

There was also a cover of Earle’s hero Jerry Jeff Walker’s Mr Bojangles and an inevitable take on his own signature track, Copperhead Road. “There's two kinds of music, the blues and Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” he said, aptly quoting Townes Van Zandt as he strapped on his guitar. “This ain’t Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” He got that right.