There’s an embarrassment of country-related riches playing live this weekend

Steve Earle and the Dukes/The Mastersons

8 p.m. Aug. 31 at Renfro Valley Entertainment Center, 2380 Richmond St. in Mount Vernon. $43-$53. 800-765-7464. renfrovalley.com, steveearle.com.

Halfway through his rustic 2019 album of Guy Clark songs aptly titled “Guy,” Steve Earle digs into a pearl of a tune called “The Randall Knife.”

For all of his more wistful and freewheeling compositions - including the escapist serenade “L.A. Freeway” and the grand Texas dance hall reverie “Rita Ballou,” both which Earle also covers admirably on “Guy” – Clark reveals his greatest gift for narrative on works like “The Randall Knife.” It’s a subtle father-son remembrance as reverent and it is brilliantly unspoiled. Centering around a father’s prized keepsake and the symbolic importance his son places on upon it in adulthood, the song is ripe with masterful, human detail. Few outside of John Prine commanded the art better than Clark.

Earle, who is not exactly a slouch as a songsmith himself, approaches the song with zero sentimentalism. His voice reveals the crevices of a career that sent him into a perilous drug addiction over 25 years ago as well as the unblemished twang of a soul that is forever Texan (even he long ago resettled in Nashville and, more recently, New York).

Clark was more than a mere inspiration to Earle. Given their longstanding friendship and their gift of musical gab, it’s easy to picture their alliance as a reflection of the father-son union within “The Randall Knife.”

Similarly, given Clark’s death in 2016, one can almost view Earle’s eagerness to record and interpret the 16 songs of his mentoring friend on “Guy” the same way the grown son yearns for possession of the Randall knife at the conclusion of the namesake song. “I found a tear for my father’s life,” the son confesses as final verse concludes, “and all that it stood for.”

“Songwriting is something you never get through,” Clark told me in an interview prior to a 2011 performance at the Master Musicians Festival in Somerset. “You never get to be the best there is. You never get finished. There is always one more song.”

On Saturday, Earle returns to Renfro Valley to showcase the music of “Guy” along with works from his own songbook. It’s an impressive catalog boasting albums that reach back over three decades, from the 1986 breakthrough “Guitar Town” to a succession of sublime recent recordings – 2011’s “I’ll Never get Out of This World Alive,” 2013’s “The Low Highway,” 2015’s “Terraplane” and 2017’s “So You Wannabe an Outlaw” – that detail a stylistically expansive and lyrically expressive songwriting sensibility that age has only seemed to enhance.

“My peer group included Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark,” Earle told me in an interview ahead of a 2008 concert at the Kentucky Theatre. “Those guys didn’t start writing songs because they wanted to be Willie Nelson. They wanted to be Bob Dylan.”

Jamey Johnson

7 p.m. Aug. 31 at Manchester Music Hall, 899 Manchester St. 859-537-7321. $55. manchestermusichall.com, jameyjohnson.com.

Call it an embarrassment of country-related riches. The same night Earle will be honoring the music of Guy Clark at Renfro Valley, Jamey Johnson will be offering his own sense of Southern-inspired country tradition at Manchester Music Hall.

In commercial terms, the Alabama-born Johnson is an anomaly. He only sporadically releases albums but possesses a songwriting voice with a devout sense of tradition coupled with deep, unhurried tenor singing that often provides his works with an antique flavor.

Critics have been eager to slap the “outlaw” tag on Johnson. Granted, there is more than a hint of vintage Waylon Jennings in his tunes at times. But Johnson’s sense of musical heritage can’t be confined to a single stylistic era. Enforcing that observation is his 2012 album “Living for a Song,” an all-star tribute to songwriting giant Hank Cochran that placed Johnson’s smoky vocals and scholarly understanding of country music tradition alongside the talents of Alison Kraus, Emmylou Harris and the late Merle Haggard.

Johnson’s most recent album is 2015’s “You Can.”

Runaway June/The Wooks/Rifletown

6:30 p.m. Sept. 1 for the Daniel Boone Pioneer Festival at Lykins Park, 1601 Mount Sterling Rd. in Winchester. 800-298-9105, 859-744-0556. $10. danielboonepioneerfestival.com, runawayjune.com.

The country music mood carries over as the annual Daniel Boone Pioneer Festival in Winchester concludes with its traditional Sunday evening concert at Lykins Park.

In contrast to Earle and Johnson, this will be a more contemporary affair headlined by the all-female trio Runaway June. The group’s debut album “Blues Roses” was released, understandably, in late June although the lead single, “Buy My Own Drinks,” began introducing audiences to their music more than a year ago.

The Wooks, making their third regional festival appearance in four weeks following sets at Railbird and Crave Lexington, along with Winchester’s own Rifletown, will open.

This story was originally published August 28, 2019 at 1:35 PM.