Calling yourself the “Jew of Oklahoma,” not just in your album titles or songs but right there in your very stage name, is an attention grabber of positively Trumpian proportions. Yet Rubin, whose personal politics seem a lot more like he’s Feeling the Bern, isn’t dropping a hard J on us for shock value alone: His mixture of folk, country, blues and klezmer serves as a way for him to assimilate himself into the deep South in much the same way African-Americans use it to get in where they don’t fit in.

And though he’s possessed with a fine wit, Rubin’s very serious about that mixture on this, his solo debut: the former (current?) member of Austin trio Bad Livers and the appropriately named folk activists Atomic Duo opens with a hard blues called “Blues Rides a Mule” that features what sounds like a very Semitic mandolin solo, but he also does a tribute to “Cajun country” outlaw Jesse Lége, closes with Titus Turner’s “Goin’ Down to Big Mary’s” done as ’50s action jazz, and drops a klezmer doina instrumental whose violin sounds as at home as it does when it’s just a fiddle. His murder ballad is a semi-talking blues about Leo Frank and Mary Phagan. He covers Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” as if it was a I-IV-V (it kinda is).

Fortunately, he’s only improved as a songwriter, which means there are no seams showing between his many influences and his own muse. Simplifying the post-collapse economy by focusing on a slowly disappearing keychain, as he does on “Key Chain Blues,” is the kind of old-fashioned handcrafted commentary you can only learn by apprenticing real Americana, but he also explores the black comedy of the workingman’s various opiates with “Seriously (a.k.a. Too Much Weed)” and “Why Am I Trying to Kill Myself?” If you’re gonna be caught between two cultures, it always helps to have a sense of humor.