Yesterday David Ulin reminded us why we love Texas. Which is nice, since some other people have been working hard to make us forget we loved it in the first place.

Ulin profiled San Antonio, TX native Steve Earle, the singer-songwriter and acolyte of legendary Texas songsmith Townes Van Zandt. Earle, like a lot of musicians lately (notables include Patti Smith, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, and Wesley Stace, aka singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding), has caught the writing bug and is publishing his first novel in July. The novel takes its title from the last song Hank Williams recorded before he died titled, appropriately enough, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” (Check out Hank’s version here or Hank III doing a more playful, cow-punk rendition here.)

Earle uses the legend of Hank’s death as a sort of launching off point for his novel. As the story goes, Williams had a doctor who traveled with him as he went around the country performing and who was with him the night that he died. But as Earle tells Ulin, “When I buckled down, I discovered that Hank had been seeing a guy named Toby Marshall, who was not a doctor; he was a quack who claimed to be able to cure alcoholism with chloral hydrate.”

In his book, Earle decides to make Marshall a real doctor by the name of Doc Ebersole. After Williams dies, Doc drifts toward San Antonio, settling down with lowlifes and becoming a back-alley abortion doctor. From there the story apparently ventures into magical realism and other weighty themes such as religion vs. spiritualism.

On the differences between writing a novel and songs, Earle tells Ulin, “”I’ve always written stories….My songs are stories. A lot of people wonder how to write a story in three minutes. With a book, you have to figure out what to prolong and what not to.”

But here’s where, from a promotional standpoint, Earle has something that no other author (no other author with the bona fide musical chops, that is) can match him: in April he will release an album titled “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” which will have songs dealing with themes similar to that of the book.

Though there’s no mention of a tour, one can assume that readings will coincide with tour dates to promote the album. And it’s also reasonable to assume the merch table will have something not common to rock-show merch tables: a stack of books.