Earle’s ‘Dead Man’ Song Helps Keep a Cause Alive

When Steve Earle wrote the song “Billy Austin” in 1990, he thought he had said everything he wanted to about capital punishment.

Then he saw “Dead Man Walking,” director Tim Robbins’ masterful 1995 film about the ethical and emotional issues surrounding a death row convict and the families of his victims. Earle was among a dozen or so artists sent copies of a rough cut of the film by Robbins, who was looking for songs for the soundtrack.

The film moved the Nashville-based singer-songwriter so deeply that he ended up writing another song about the subject, but this time from the viewpoint of a prison guard, not the inmate as in “Billy Austin.”

Not only did the new song, “Ellis Unit One,” end up being the most absorbing song on the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack album, but it also arguably was the most distinguished recording of the year.

“[‘Ellis’] wasn’t written out of compassion for the people being executed,” says Earle, one of the most acclaimed figures to emerge from country music over the last decade. “It was written about the damage that executions do to the rest of us in society . . . because we all have a hand in it, especially the people we pay to carry out the job for us.”

Earle will sing “Ellis Unit One” as part of his half-hour set in a benefit concert Sunday at the Shrine Auditorium. The event, which is titled “Not in Our Name: Dead Man Walking--The Concert,” will also feature four other artists whose music was used on the “Dead Man” soundtrack: Eddie Vedder, Lyle Lovett, Michelle Shocked and Tom Waits.

Like Bruce Springsteen, who was also featured on the “Dead Man Walking” album (but isn’t part of the Shrine lineup), Earle is an artist whose music has often touched on social issues.

“It isn’t something you hear in a lot of music out of Nashville anymore,” Earle says. “But I started out playing in coffeehouses [in Texas], which is an environment that encouraged you to write political or topical songs.

“At a pretty early age, I adopted people like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark as heroes, and they always were part of what you might call alternative country . . . music that operated outside the mainstream. With them, you never got the feeling they measured success by how high a song went on the charts, but how deeply it touched someone.”

Earle says he has been opposed to the death penalty since his childhood in Texas. “I remember my father writing a letter to the governor to try and stop an execution in Texas in the ‘60s,” he explains. “That was the first activism I saw.

“But Tim’s film was the first time that I plugged into the idea to write a song about more than [solely] the guy in the cell. The film showed me a way to say something that I had been trying to say for years . . . the idea that we are all victims during an execution.”

Specifically, he says, he got the idea for the song from a scene in the rough cut in which a prison guard complains to a nun that the executions are beginning to haunt him.

Besides the album alumni, Sunday’s bill also includes Ani DiFranco, Vedder’s Pearl Jam bandmate Jeff Ament and Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Even though Robbins didn’t originally send a copy of the film to DiFranco, he has since become a fan of her music and she, too, has been invited to perform at the Shrine event, which will raise funds for Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation and Hope House.

Rahat is the nephew of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the late Pakistani singer who was a key member of the album cast.

Though Earle is proud of the “Dead Man Walking” album and is looking forward to Sunday’s concert, he says the Robbins film itself is so powerful that he has been unable to watch it all the way through more than once since its release.

“It’s so painful,” he says. “But I can’t forget the images. That’s one of the things about [art] that is so valuable. There are some movies, books and, I’d like to think, some songs, that not only teach us about things, but make sure we can’t forget or ignore them.”

* “Not in Our Name: Dead Man Walking--The Concert,” the Shrine Auditorium, 665 W. Jefferson Blvd. $30-$75. (213) 749-5123.