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Joe Henry Gives His Own Tone to the Blues

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The musical wanderer's 'Blood From Stars' was released last week, also has become a noted producer.

Joe Henry is tapped into the American past in unexpected ways. He lives in a roomy South Pasadena Craftsman designed for President Garfield's widow, and his preferred attire, a black suit and pointy boots, suggests that the 48-year-old singer and guitarist would have been at home playing in Elvis Presley's first band.

“I typically come to things late," Henry said. “I was too busy with Leadbelly when the Clash happened."

These days, the easygoing musician is venturing back to some of the most harrowing music in the American canon: The tormented country blues of Son House, Robert Johnson and Skip James. “To me, it's like reading Keats or Blake," he said during a recent interview in his basement studio. “It's about engaging in the idea of mortality. It takes God, sex, love and death and puts them all in the same room -- and grapples. It's not all answered, but it's all engaged."

The album inspired by this journey, “Blood From Stars," released Tuesday, uses the line-repetition typical of the blues tradition: “Nobody knows . . . the man that I keep hid," the first lyric begins. “Nobody knows . . . the man that I keep hid."

But “Blood" sounds less like a scratchy old Delta blues record than a collection of musical short stories, or the soundtrack to an invisible film. In its impressionistic liner notes, Henry calls the songs scenes for a play.

“I was very consciously thinking about blues song form, not musical tonality," Henry said. “There's no sense in trying to re-create a blues record, but I find the [blues] song form to be incredibly powerful. It's like why people go back to the sonnet or the haiku. That form has power, and the structure gives you a bit of direction."

Henry possesses one of those high-integrity reputations that doesn't translate into heavy record sales. Elvis Costello deemed his 2003 “Tiny Voices" album -- the first of three on the Anti- label -- as demonstrating “a wonderful musical and sonic fabric that is entirely his own." He also has become a noted producer, crafting career comebacks for soul singers Solomon Burke ("Don't Give Up on Me") and Bettye LaVette ("I've Got My Own Hell to Raise") as well as Allen Toussaint's New Orleans-themed collaboration with Costello, “The River in Reverse."

But his career has been long and twisted enough to fill, well, an old blues song. Born in North Carolina and raised in the South and Midwest, Henry fell hard as a kid for Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. He recorded several singer-songwriter style albums in the late '80s and early '90s, the last two of which featured members of the Jayhawks.

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