Outside his public identity, I confess I don't know who Reverend Freakchild is. I guess it doesn't matter. I do know who till recently I thought he was: some kind of Grateful Dead spin-off act or a lost soul hoarding the shards of the 1960s counterculture. I wasn't entirely wrong, and I don't mean just because of the occasional drug references in the self-composed cuts. The Dead, which began as a jug band, incorporated American roots influences into an experimental-rock approach and never relinquished them. When I lived in Chicago, I listened to a folk-based show that routinely aired Dead songs. The host insisted that at its heart the Dead was a folk/blues outfit.

Early downhome blues (as issued in the 1920s and '30s) found a new life in the folk revival, which led to a blues revival, and soon enough blues-inflected rock bands bringing the Charlie Patton-and-other songbooks back into the world. Though old music is to my taste, modern outsider performances of it (especially blues) are often sufficiently unedifying that one approaches them with a certain trepidation; you might come to deem them guilty until proven innocent. I infer about Reverend Freakchild that at least as represented here he is not a rocker particularly. After growing up in Hawaii, it says here, he went on to secure advanced degrees in philosophy and theology. He considers Buddhism and music his religions. Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but otherwise the biography is pretty scant.

Still, I'm glad I got to hear this album (a two-disc set), which is largely a retrospective of previously recorded traditionals, covers and originals, united if not in origin then broadly in style. Freakchild, by the way, issued his first album in 2002.

A Bluesman of Sorts works because Freakchild does it his way. He doesn't try to imitate the distinctive vocal styles of the Black South of a century or more ago. The closest he gets to an apology for what the unduly sensitive might judge cultural expropriation is the humorous one in the title. He sings casually in a conversational manner. The material ends up laid back enough to short-circuit the standard responses, e.g., "What the hell is this guy doing with 'Come On in My Kitchen' [Robert Johnson] and 'Roll and Tumble Blues' [Hambone Willie Newbern, more famously Muddy Waters]?" Not only are these associated with two of the most towering figures in blues history, but they're among the most well-known numbers in the genre.

Well, it turns out that Freakchild doesn't worry about it, or at least as far as this listener can tell. He just does it as it makes sense to him, with a band that is in equal parts adept at the acoustic and the electric, often integrating the approaches with such deceptive ease that they feel more authentic than mere reality merits. They are listenable, and even those who, like me, are conversant in the source recordings will, or ought to, waste no time or effort on snooty comparisons.

If it's art you want (one thinks of Ry Cooder's arrangements of comparable material), Freakchild's is the casual, low-budget version. For all the respect Cooder has -- deservedly -- garnered over his long career, it's also the case that he has had more money than just about any roots-revivalist musician ever to play with when he enters the studio.

Given what he has at hand, including a respectable level of intelligence, imagination and passion (plus some spirituals and a couple of out-of-nowhere pop songs), Freakchild does nicely. And chances are he'll have you returning to take it in again.