Death -- or some other danger -- lurks around nearly every corner on Bay Area bluesman Chris Cotton's new solo CD, "I Watched the Devil Die."

"The Devil gets drunk all the time/ He ask you for a nickel and he'll end up with all your dimes," barks the San Jose native in a pain-soaked baritone. In that song, which Cotton based on a dream, he survives the encounter.

On another original number, "Black Night," Cotton imagines being confronted by his girlfriend's husband. "After he kills me, he might just kill you," he tells her before hightailing it out of town.

"There's a dark element to it," says Cotton, 29. "But I think I managed to do it without sounding anything at all like Tom Waits." He's sitting beneath an orange tree in the backyard of his grandmother's Mountain View home, where he'd lived before moving last year to a cabin in the woods of Lagunitas in Marin County. Stringy bangs protrude from the brim of a red cap bearing a logo from the Shack Up Inn, a former plantation outside Clarksdale, Miss., where shotgun shacks that once housed sharecroppers have been converted into tourist cabins.

Cotton cut his just-released album last April for the Yellow Dog label of Memphis at a downtown Clarksdale studio owned by Squirrel Nut Zippers front man Jimbo Mathus. Elvis Costello recorded there the week before Cotton.

Steeped in the Piedmont style of such 1930s Carolina legends as Blind Boy Fuller and the Rev. Gary Davis, Cotton's take on the blues is decidedly old- fashioned -- similar to that of Greenwich Village folkies Dave Van Ronk and Roy Book Binder, who took up a similar calling in the 1960s.

"It's based on the most basic human emotions -- you know, love and relationships -- and societal issues like working for the man or being a slave to a corrupt employment system," Cotton says of his attraction to acoustic country blues. "I would never compare my situation to the very extreme and unfair situations that sharecroppers, and African American slaves before them, faced, but I've certainly dealt with some pretty bad situations, whether working on a ship or as a cook or as a busboy for $2.33 an hour. I understand the basic aspect of being kept under someone's thumb.

"By doing mostly my original things within this very tight genre, I'm trying to come up with new and fresh stuff while trying to retain the fundamental feel and attitude behind the music."

"I Watched the Devil Die" includes treatments of vintage material by Blind Willie McTell, Skip James, John Hurt and the Mississippi Sheiks, but most of the tunes are Cotton originals, some reflecting his troubled youth and time as a transient. He was kicked out of high school in Sacramento, dropped out of Washington State University after one semester, served 90 days in a Boulder jail after a barroom brawl, then was extradited to Washington on a warrant for growing marijuana and did three more months behind bars.

Cotton then hitchhiked and hopped freight trains to New Orleans, where he spent a year and a half busking in the French Quarter, sleeping in fields or under bridges when there wasn't enough money for a room. Next, he worked several months as a deckhand on an oil-rig towboat in the Gulf of Mexico, but on his first night back on shore, he was robbed at gunpoint of his entire $1, 400 earnings by a man who'd asked him for a cigarette.

He's paid his dues to sing these blues.

Back in Mountain View at his grandmother's, Cotton landed a job at a Palo Alto music store and, in 2000, formed an acoustic blues quartet called the Blue Eyed Devils.

"Malcolm X used to refer to white people as blue-eyed devils," he explains. "It had kind of an ironic meaning as far as us white kids from Whiteville, U.S.A., playing traditional African American music." Before breaking up 14 months ago, the Blue Eyed Devils released two CDs on their own label and played a lot of parties and gigs on the West Coast.

Cotton performs without accompaniment on some tracks of "I Watched the Devil Die" and is joined on other selections by musicians from the Clarksdale area, including drummer Lee Williams, 18, and guitarist Big Jack Johnson, 64.

Except for occasional banjo, guitar, bass and drum parts by Mathus, who engineered the CD, the sessions were done without overdubs. Many of the songs are first takes. "It's not supposed to be perfect," Cotton said of the album. "It's kind of about feeling, rather than striving for perfection."

Although his music is solidly within the blues tradition, Cotton is conscious of the anti-blues bias of many radio programmers, rock critics and booking agents, who view it as genre that appeals mainly to "white guys in their 40s." He prefers to call what he and his current combo, the New Hokum 3's, play "Americana."

"Most people, when they think of blues, think of B.B. King or Stevie Ray Vaughan," he says. "What I'm doing is not really technically blues. There's not one 12-bar blues on the whole record. I would imagine that there's marketability to my music that is outside the very narrow genre of blues and that younger people -- people my age -- would appreciate what I'm doing."