Steve Earle sits on his bus at an Owensboro, Ky. bluegrass festival. He played the Opry the night before, Summerfest in Milwaukee the night before that. Once the show at this bluegrass festival is over, he’s beelining back to Nashville to spend a day with his son John Henry, before flying to Texas to tape Austin City Limits, play Willie Nelson’s iconic 4th of July Picnic, then do a gig in Louisiana, and wind up at Edgartown’s Old Whaling Church on Martha’s Vineyard for a show on July 9.

And that’s just this week.

It turns out the 63-year-old, politically active troubadour many people didn’t think would live to see the 21st century — as the first wave of his rugged songwriting acclaim was breaking in multiple divorces, pernicious hard drug addiction and, ultimately, jail time — is more vital than ever.

As the New York Yankees play the Boston Red Sox on the bus’s television, he’s scanning the mid-afternoon crowd.

“There’s this 300-pound guy with a banjo,” the multiple-Grammy winner marvels, “under this tiny tent, maybe five feet from the men’s bathroom. He’s got a small marquis, like you’d buy for your kids, and he’s out there in the heat, playing banjo. These festivals are all about the amateurs and the jamming, seeing everybody getting their instruments out and playing. I love that.”

Having earned his bluegrass bones with his post-prison Train a Comin’ with Peter Rowan, Norman Blake and Roy Huskey, Jr, then The Mountain with Del McCoury and McCoury’s family, the burly songwriter who gave us Guitar Town, Copperhead Road and So You Wanna Be An Outlaw now straddles stripped-down rock, blue collar country, Americana roots and the stark poetry of Townes Van Zandt.

His latest album, Guy, comprised of 16 songs by Texas legend Guy Clark, is a fuller-bodied book-end to his 2009 minimalist homage to Townes Van Zandt.

Half joking, Earle admits, “I am going to meet Guy again some time, and I didn’t wanna have to talk about why Townes got a record and he didn’t.”

Earle, son of a Houston air traffic controller, had run off to join the folkies, forming a “captain and the kid” bond with Townes Van Zandt, the troubled legend who’d written Pancho & Lefty, If I Needed You and To Live Is To Fly.

But Guy Clark’s legend always loomed large too.

When Earle made his first trip to Nashville, “I spent the whole time waiting to meet him, three weeks or so.”

Stopping by Bishop’s Pub, a watering hole for expat Texas songwriters trying to make Nashville work, Earle was told by the bartender that Clark was in the back room.

“So I pulled my hat down over my eyes, this beat [up] 3X beaver cowboy hat with a band, slunk into a corner and sat there. It was Guy, (wife) Susanna, Jim Stafford and Deborah Allen, playing teams and shooting pool. I just sat there for a bit, and then Guy was lining up a shot, I wasn’t in the way, but he could see me. He said, ‘Nice hat,’ and sunk the ball.”

Clark came over to talk. Earle explained he knew Townes and a friendship began. When Clark’s Ole No. 1 was released, Earle was tapped to play bass. Having recently signed a song publishing deal, it was decided Earle was a better writer than a bass player, and he was sent home to work on his craft.

Though Johnny Lee had a Top 10 hit with When You Fall in Love co-written by Earle, things weren’t falling into place for Earle. Even a deal with the Oak Ridge Boys’ Silverline/Goldine Publishing, which saw Waylon Jennings record Earle’s Devil’s Right Hand, and an aborted quasi-rockabilly record for CBS Nashville failed to launch.

“The turning point for me was seeing Springsteen’s Born In The USA Tour, and watching him turn a 20,000-seat arena into a coffeehouse. I went home and literally started writing Guitar Town the next day, because that, to me, was bringing it all together.”

Working class ethos, the unseen, the powerful downstroke, the churning rhythm section, and — always — the stories, Guitar Town arrived alongside Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs and Rodney Crowell’s Diamonds & Dirt, and ushered in an elevation and pathos to Music City that had been missing since Kris Kristofferson.

Suddenly the kid eclipsed his mentors. But the bravado for a time was matched by the addictions. Earle recalled getting a sobriety visit from Van Zandt.

“That’s when you know you’re in trouble,” he said.

But always the music remained.

“I abused the gift I was given, and I couldn’t do this for four years,” Earle said. “I know what happens when you can’t do what you’re meant to. That’s not a good thing, so I’m very careful about taking care of myself, my band, my world.”

Noting that it took a casino gig in Mississippi to balance the finances to come to the Vineyard — “it’s the only way I could make the travel and payroll work” — he is looking forward “to seeing the place Willy Mason comes from.”

Even as he pays tribute to those who inspired him, Earle said he is always listening for young writers, curious about the things that inspire their art.

Earle’s next record, tentatively titled Ghosts of West Virginia, is political, inspired by songs he wrote for Coal Country, a play by Exonerated creators Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen.

“We went and interviewed miners, but especially two guys who survived a mine collapse because they were still aboveground,” he said.

“This record is really about West Virginia, and not so much preaching to the choir as perhaps speaking to some Trump voters who we need to win back, who are looking for someone to speak to their concerns, hear their problems and struggles instead of just the name-calling they’re getting. The working class can’t be left behind, and that’s what people miss.”

What people miss has given Earle’s work its bite since Good Ole Boy (Getting Tough) landed on a very different country radio in 1986. With an eye on the nation, a liberal perspective that’s more humanist than anything, it is his willingness to scrape and splinter tough spots and vulnerable emotions that have made him — like Van Zandt and Clark — endure. But it’s also how he captures the world.

“The kids who discovered Townes through the Americana Industrial Complex are obsessed with someone who was diminished. They never heard the real beauty of who and how he was, which is why Townes is way more intimate. Just like Guy never made great records until he dispensed with the drums. But I’ve got an electric band who can play anything, and Guy’s songs can take that....So I wanted this record to reflect that. I still used the same idiosyncratic pick he did that simulated the attack of a flatpick, but I [also] wanted to make those songs mine.

“I learned LA Freeway, Desperadoes Waiting for a Train and Old Time Feeling from Jerry Jeff [Walker], which weren’t close to Guy’s versions. All songs that were very adult, and very revelatory, and something so true to him. So when people come out, they’re gonna get 11 of the 16 songs, because that’s about what it seems like people can take. But they’re gonna get a lot more, too, because I tell some stories that bring it all together, too.”

Steve Earle and the Dukes peform on Tuesday, July 9 at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. Visit mvconcertseries for tickets and full summer schedule.