'Don't you got nothing better to do than listen to a man from another time?' Seasick Steve asks on the title track of his third, and latest, major label album.
There are worse ways of passing 50 minutes or so. Steven Gene Wold, as he used to be known, is a man in his late 60s who sings with the weather-beaten voice of hard experience. He is also a guitarist who plays rough and ready blues like a man who has really felt them.
He plays a range of eccentric battered instruments and apparently attributes his success to the novelty value of having been seen on British television - and then many more times on YouTube - playing a guitar he calls 'The Three String Trance Wonder'.
It was indeed a YouTube clip that got my attention, but what held it was a fine balance between authentic blues feeling and a pithy gallows humour nicely exemplified by the title of his breakthrough CD, 2008's I Started Out with Nothin' and I Still Got Most of it Left.
The lyrics on Man from Another Time on Atlantic continue in the same dry vein, and chronicle a period of his life that he summed up beautifully with the remark: 'Hobos are people who move around looking for work, tramps are people who move around but don't look for work, and bums are people who don't move and don't work. I've been all three.'
He has done more productive things since. He has been making a living mostly from his musical and sound engineering skills since the 1970s, but seems to have a nostalgia for the drifter's life he used to lead.
On Just Because I Can (CSX) a man with a settled life dreams of returning to his hobo ways and hopping on a freight train. On the other hand, the harsh realities of too many nights spent in the jails of inhospitable towns are well remembered in Never Go West.