Chris Cotton is a time traveler. The singing guitarist made his initial recordings during the first two years of the current decade as front-man for the Blue Eyed Devils. The quartet from the San Francisco peninsula cut a couple of superb CDs - "Hard Luck Town" and "Legend of Shorty Brown" - of mostly original songs performed in the “Bluebird” manner, an urbanized 1930s take on country blues associated with Chicago producer Lester Melrose and artists such as Big Bill Broonzy and Washboard Sam. Former Squirrel Nut Zippers front man Jimbo Mathus co-produced the second of the group’s discs at his studio in Efland, North Carolina.

The Blue Eyed Devils have since broken up and Mathus has moved his base of operations to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he produced Cotton’s solo debut. Though Cotton’s own music is as retro as the Blue Eyed Devils, urban elements are largely missing from "I Watched the Devil Die". It’s as if he’s taken his blues to another time and place, alternately capturing the back-porch intimacy and the juke-joint raucousness of rural Southern blues in his mix of original songs (including a washboard-driven salute to Broonzy titled "Blues For Big Bill") and treatments of chestnuts like Blind Willie McTell’s "Dyin’ Crapshooters Blues", the Mississippi Shieks "That’s It", Skip James "I’m So Glad", and Mississippi John Hurt’s "Louis Collins".

Cotton’s fingerpicking, much of it in the ragtime-inflected Piedmont style, is accomplished, but far from polished, and his craggy baritone voice, which suggests both Tom Waits and Leon Redbone, adds to general rawness of his presentation. Cotton performs much of the material alone using acoustic guitar, with fiddler Hamilton Rott, pianist Adam Woodard, bassist Barry Bays, and drummer Lee Williams joining in from time to time. Big Jack Johnson brings his electric slide to "Black Night", a Cotton original that romps with the type of ensemble abandon one associates with Howlin’ Wolf’s Memphis sessions.