Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” and the Novelty Song He Compares It To

Immense success has a funny way of changing even the most serious songs into somewhat of a novelty, and this is certainly true for Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.” The iconic title track and corresponding record are some of Earle’s most commercially successful works, something he has come to appreciate even if he doesn’t understand it.

From comparisons to 1994 techno-billy tracks to potential legal trouble the song created, we take a look at what Steve Earle really thinks about his genre-bending signature song.

Steve Earle Compared “Copperhead Road” to a Rednex Track

Five years after Steve Earle released his 1988 album ‘Copperhead Road,’ he went to jail for heroin possession. His arrest followed years of struggling with substance abuse, which landed the singer-songwriter in various degrees of hardships in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was around this time that his 1988 title track, “Copperhead Road,” started to take off in line-dancing honky tonks across the country, as he recalled in a 2023 interview with The Music. 

Earle told the Australian culture site that the craze took off when he was either homeless or in jail. He compared his iconic signature song to Rednex’s techno-billy novelty song “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” “It gets played at every single line dance in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona every night. There’s college kids that weren’t even born when that song came out dancing to it now.”

Earle said that the novelty of his song doesn’t bother him, explaining, “That’s f***ing immortality right there!” But the multi-hyphenate performer did admit to not knowing what constituted a hit. “I’ve never been able to figure out why something of mine is popular, but something else isn’t,” he said. “All these people told me the importance of a great chorus for everyone to sing along to. “Copperhead Road” doesn’t have a chorus. I write plenty of songs with choruses, but not many of them have ever been hits the same way those songs have. It’s a truly bizarre thing.”

The Musician Faced Potential Legal Trouble For His Song

Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” takes place in the woodsy hollers of Appalachia—specifically, Johnson County in eastern Tennessee. The track’s popularity led to countless vandals stealing “Copperhead Road” street signs off their poles throughout the region. In fact, the problem became so pervasive that law enforcement officers tried to pin the consequences on the songwriter. 

“They changed the names of nearly all the Copperhead Roads in these mountains because people kept stealing the signs,” Earle explained in a 2017 interview with WBIR. “There was actually a sheriff somewhere, and I don’t think it was Tennessee, I think it was North Carolina, that actually tried to take legal action against me to recoup all the money from all the signs that they had to replace.”

Regardless of the potential legal consequences or the unintended association with the line dancing craze, Earle said in a 2017 “Behind the Vinyl” feature that he still plays the song at every performance “because I want to get out of there alive. Somebody asked me if I get sick of it, and you don’t get sick of songs that sort of give you a way to make a living doing something you love.”

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