The Singing Drifter, indeed. Unless you hung out on Chicago’s Maxwell Street sometime after World War II and sometime before the Iranian hostage crisis, you probably don’t know who Blind Arvella Gray is. In fact, this folk-blues busker recorded only one album—this one, released back in 1972, instantly snapped up by fanatics, and never reissued. Until now. In fact, there are four unreleased tracks on it this time around, so the fanatics will have to buy it again. (They won’t mind.)

With the blues, obscurity almost never equals lack of talent, however, and that holds true here: Bob Dylan was only the most famous admirer of Gray’s dog-bark voice, his bizarre but oddly appropriate tunings, his impressive interpretive abilities, and the sheer joyful zeal of his guitar attack. (His slide National Dobro, so says the PR, was actually sold on eBay recently.) To any good country bluesman, there’s barely a fingernail’s worth of difference between the indigenous musics of his country and time, and Gray demonstrates that sense with takes on bluegrass like “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One,” work songs in the name of “John Henry,” and traditionals such as “Take Your Burden To The Lord.” (The four unreleased tracks, mostly traditional and sacred, seem to have been left off from the original merely out of concern over running time; they fit in seamlessly.)

Also like most iconoclasts of this stripe, it’d take a team of guitar scholars to figure out just exactly what Arvella’s laying down here, but the overall effect—like a chorus of slightly atonal, dusty drunken seraphim swooping around him as he sings—is fascinating. Even songs you’ve heard a billion times before, like “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” take on a special new life in Gray’s experienced hands. And he doesn’t even need to play: “Gander Dancing Song” and “Arvella’s Work Song” are just that, a capella melanges of chain gang standards introduced with a bit of history (“When them boys sing those lonesome songs, you better watch ‘em”). Fans of country-blues and folk should be falling all over themselves to grab this right now, but everyone else can find their own tales of loss and redemption in here just as easily.