San Francisco Bay Area-based bluesman Chris Cotton, founder of the short-lived retro blues combo The Blue Eyed Devils, has a lot going for him on this debut solo project. His solid, cliché-free songwriting, consummate acoustic interpretations of vintage back country chestnuts (Blind Willie McTell's "Dying Crapshooter's Blues" and Mississippi John Hurt's "Louis Collins" are particularly moving) and a cagily primitive, ragtime-nuanced guitar and gravelly baritone vocal approach keep one constantly anticipating what's next.

Recorded at progressive producer Jimbo Mathus' Clarksdale, Mississippi vintage-equipment studio and employing local Clarksdale and Memphis backup musicians (including fiddler Hamilton Rott, honky-tonk pianist Adam Woodard, young drummer Lee Williams and multi-instrumentalist Olga), Cotton and Mathus concoct a modern-day jam session with organic house-party overtones. Best realized, perhaps, on the hill-country flavored, nine-minute take of Cotton's incendiary epiphany "Black Night," with stinging, trance-inducing electric slide guitar by special guest Big Jack Johnson leading the charge, but evident throughout all twelve tracks.

Heart and craft are also perfectly paired on Cotton's semi-autobiographical "Morgan City, Mississippi," his ragged-but-right "Goin' Back Home," the imaginative title story-song, "Blues for Big Bill" (aflush with Olga's washboard thimbling) and a finger-picking enlivened take on the traditional "Bill Bailey." Other carefully chosen covers include Skip James' "I'm So Glad" and a killer revamping of the Mississippi Sheiks' brilliantly boozy "That's It."

A lively and vivid aural portrait of a fast vanishing rural musical era that owes a deep debt to Southern bluesmen like Blind Boy Fuller and Americana pioneers like Dave Van Ronk alike.