Click here to watch Justin Townes Earle perform "Slippin' and Slidin'" from his new album Harlem River Blues.

On a greasy-hot summer day in New York City, down in the East Village, Justin Townes Earle looked like a man in need of a porch. Gangly and long-limbed, his face dwarfed by an oversize pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses, the twenty-eight-year-old singer-songwriter was sprawled on a wooden bench outside the 11th Street Bar, lazily smoking a cigarette beneath a neon-green Brooklyn Lager sign, as unhurried and unperturbed as a Southern porch sitter waving idly to passing cars. As a native Tennessean, descended from “Texas farmers and Kentucky moonshiners,” Earle comes by porch sitting as naturally as he comes by country music (his middle name, Townes, pays homage to Townes Van Zandt, while his last name is from his father, the renegade country icon Steve Earle). In fact, since moving to New York from Nashville two years ago, it’s one of the things he misses most about the South: “Sitting down on somebody’s porch and barbecuing,” he told me. “And not what they call barbecuing up here, where you show up and it’s, like, hamburgers.” »

For the moment, nonetheless, Earle seemed content with this urban proxy: a compact rectangle of stone outside his favorite bar, just down the sidewalk from his apartment, in a city where people flip the bird at passing cars rather than wave to them. Wildly content, even. “I’m never leaving this city, ever,” he said, once inside the bar. “It’ll take more than terrorists, high water, boiling oil, to take me off this island.” He loves the way Manhattan’s brash, frantic energy stokes his songwriting. He digs the instant gratification the city supplies: “If I want duck confit at four a.m., I can get duck confit at four a.m. And I like duck confit at four a.m.” It’s a relief, he said, to shoot the breeze about topics other than music and guitars, Nashville’s dominant subjects. As a voracious clothes hound (earlier this year, GQ named Earle one of the “25 most stylish men in the world”), he’s thrilled by the city’s hyperactive fashion sense. And for a man who (barely) survived five drug overdoses before the age of twenty-one, and who confesses a dangerous attraction to guns and unstable women and classic country-lyric bedlam, he seemed relieved to be free of the ghosts and dark landmarks of his former life. He’s a New Yorker now; he’s even learned to use the f-word in a friendly greeting.

That doesn’t mean he’s turned his back on the South. Clear evidence for that can be heard in every song on his third full-length album, Harlem River Blues, on the Bloodshot Records label. The title track’s geographic reference notwithstanding, Harlem River Blues is an unabashed sonic tribute to the South. From a Hank Snow– and Hank Williams–infused rockabilly romp (“Move Over Mama”) to a chicka-chicka train song pulling loads of Jimmie Rodgers influence (“Workin’ for the MTA”) to the Memphis guitar licks that go skittering through “Slippin’ and Slidin’” to the down-home gospel choir and Hammond B-3 organ swirls backing him on the irrepressible title track, Harlem River Blues is a thirty-one-minute road trip through the South’s musical landscape.

That’s by design, said Earle, who classifies his genre as Southern American rather than Americana or, God forbid, alt-country (“It’s either country or it ain’t,” he once told an interviewer). “What I always attempt to do on my records is to cover the South,” he explained, “because we own all popular forms of music. They’re all inherently ours, because we created them all. (Okay, hip-hop, New York’s got that.) But we’ve got string music from the hills of North Carolina and Virginia and eastern Tennessee that moves over to bluegrass in Kentucky, country music in Nashville, blues in the Delta and all over the South, jazz in New Orleans, and like Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz, this all slides to Memphis and becomes rock ’n’ roll. So they’re all ours.

“It’s just all about my roots,” he went on. “And even though I’m living in New York, Truman Capote was able to come up here and remain very Southern, and Tennessee Williams too. My roots are just very, very deep in the South, so [Southern music] is one of those things I’ll always keep doing. There’s just too much of it—you can never learn it all, and you’ll never be able to escape it.”