Who can forget seeing Steve Earle shot in the face on HBO’s “Treme”?

That bone-chilling, art-imitating- local-life scene of the mugging-turned-murder of Earle’s character Harley Watt ended a two-season stint on the show for the outlaw-country poet par excellence. Thankfully for us, Watt’s gruesome killing isn’t the enduring legacy of Earle in New Orleans. He gave us forever the defiant glare of Watt strumming his six-string acoustic— emblazoned with the triumphant post-K Woody Guthrie tribute “This Machine Floats”—plus his song “This City,” which rolled with season one’s closing credits with its opening lyrical salvo: “Don’t matter, let come what may/ I ain’t never gonna leave this town/ This city won’t wash away/ This city won’t ever drown.”

And thankfully for Earle, 60, his living-legend career isn’t limited by the enduring legacy of the infectious, deservedly immortal “Copperhead Road” (1988), or fellow high-charting tunes “Guitar Town” and “Someday.” Even more mercifully, Earle’s life and work didn’t drown in the early ’90s, during his self-induced hiatus spent shooting dope in the slums of South Nashville, the city where he first made his mark as a singer-songwriter in 1983 (after a stint in Houston with hero Townes Van Zandt, whom he reportedly ran away from home to follow around Texas at age 14).

Today, Earle lives in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village and is perhaps best known to local audiences for his stellar set on the Fais Do-Do Stage at the 2012 Jazz Fest—and the single “Mississippi, It’s Time,” released in September to help inspire the Magnolia State to remove the Confederate symbol from its state flag. Earle comes to town with the Dukes, the same band from the aforementioned Jazz Fest barn-burner. Talented husband-and-wife indie-folk duo the Mastersons open the show.

Steve Earle & the Dukes plus the Mastersons play Tipitina’s on Monday, November 16. Doors 7p, show 8p. Tickets $25.