An accidental Houstonian, Eric Taylor arrived in the city in 1970 with no money and no prospects and no plans to stay, only to become a treasured and crucial part of Houston’s storied folk music scene.

Taylor was a writer of great depth and intensity who left no space for unneeded words. Tall and glowering, he cut an intimidating figure and was difficult to impress, but he could also be a nurturing mentor. Lyle Lovett — who covered several Taylor songs and also co-wrote with him — once described him as “a real teacher for me.”

Nanci Griffith — who sang Taylor’s songs and was married to him for several years in the late ’70s and early ’80s — once called him “the William Faulkner of songwriting in our current time.”

Taylor — who bridged a songwriting scene from old masters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark to younger writers like Lovett and Steve Earle — died Monday after months of poor health. He was 70.

His wife, Susan Lindfors Taylor, announced two weeks ago that Taylor’s health was continuing to deteriorate after a hospitalization late last year.

A Georgia native, Taylor traveled to Houston from North Carolina. His plan was to take a train to California, but Houston is where he ran out of money. He tried crashing in Hermann Park and was rousted. For $8 a week he found a place on Bagby that he called “a hippie flophouse,” and from there took a low-paying collection job before upgrading to a job washing dishes. As a dishwasher at the Family Hand, he saw musicians who changed the course of his life: from the blues great Lightnin’ Hopkins to Van Zandt, one of Hopkins’ greatest students.

Taylor found a club scene that emphasized new original songs because club owners didn’t want to pay ASCAP fees.

“These places were about the writer,” he said of Houston’s scene. “Houston was the writer’s place.” He was a regular at the storied songwriter’s clubs in the city, which — with the exception of Anderson Fair — have all closed, relics from a rich time in the city’s music history.

Taylor’s recorded output over half a century wasn’t deep, but each song exhibited deep thematic contemplation and great economy of words and detail. He’d take inspiration where he could find it, often from books, films and other sources of lore. “Hollywood Pocketknife” was inspired by a photograph of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Their chauffeur stood on the periphery cleaning his fingernails with a pocket knife.

Taylor had been studying, writing, editing and rewriting for a decade before he released “Shameless Love.” His debut album was a perfect thing: nine tightly wound stories with an emphasis on characters caught in various states of struggle. “Only Lovers” finds him deftly expressing a slow arc toward solitude: “Now the highway feels like just another road,” he sings. Later: “Now the music feels like just another song.”

Familiarity didn’t breed contempt. It created solitude.

The dark corners of Taylor’s songs weren’t written speculatively. Even when writing about other characters, their struggles were something he knew well. Taylor wouldn’t make another album for 14 years after “Shameless Love,” as alcoholism caused personal and professional problems.

His voice lost a little lift when he reemerged with “Eric Taylor” in 1995, but his writing exhibited further hard-won wisdom. A meditation on the elusive things in life inspired “Whooping Crane,” which Lovett would cover.

Taylor’s great gift was characters who he’d enliven with enough mythology to where the real and the fictional could be indistinguishable. The reality of a given name didn’t matter: the themes of searching and endurance mattered.

“Scuffletown,” released in 2001, was another standout.

He was unafraid to sing in a conversational manner. Even his whispered lyrics carried weight: “I’d rather have the audience lean in than be pushed back,” he said. “I mean, how loud does it need to be?”

For the seriousness he projected in song, Taylor also possessed a very dry wit. He had an affinity for clowns and clown figurines. He also co-wrote “Fat Babies” with Lovett, a song that reveled in the absurdity of its singalong chorus: “Fat babies have no pride.”

“He didn’t suffer any bull, but he was a guy with a big old heart, too,” said Rock Romano, who produced a couple of Taylor’s albums. “It took me some time to really listen to his songs. But once I started listening, (expletive), they make me shiver.”

Taylor wrote and lived quietly in a little house in Weimar. He remained an active touring act until his final years. He was a little slower to record, making his last record, “Studio 10” in 2013.

It was the fifth Taylor had made on his own Blue Ruby label that he ran with his wife. While a big mainstream hit eluded him, Taylor’s broader renown gradually began to grow closer to his reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter. Lovett covered his “Memphis Midnight/Memphis Morning” for “Step Inside This House” in 1998. The Lovett album was designed to draw attention to some of his influences. Some were quite well-known, like Michael Martin Murphy, and others had attained elder statesman status like Guy Clark. But the song clearly connected the successful student to his mentor.

“I learned so much from the way he structured a song,” Lovett told me years ago. “What to put in, what to leave out.”

I always admired the economy of a line from Taylor’s song “Bill,” about the late, great songwriter Bill Morrissey: “I’ve been through this town before/It’s got a four-way stop and a liquor store.”

That song referred to Morrissey’s struggles with addiction as “a hobo fight.” It was something Taylor knew, and also emerged from after a twisted path.

“A hobo fight, to me, is having a fight with yourself,” he said. “There’s pretty much no way out of that one. You can’t call anybody to help you.”

I think my favorite piece of Taylor lore is a little reference in the liner notes to Lovett’s “I Love Everybody” album. Lovett attributed the guitar solo on the song “I’ve Got the Blues” as such: “Based on a Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar lick as played by Townes Van Zandt, as shown to Lyle Lovett by Eric Taylor in the back room of Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant, Houston, Texas, October 1979.”

Lovett’s take creates a river-like flow of music, an old-school master and apprentice series of relationships where the old teach the young, who grow older and then pass along the lesson once again.

andrew.dansby@chron.com