The blues can still be a music of compelling intimacy. Richard Cook hears living proof in the work of Kelly Joe Phelps

It's a commonplace that most contemporary music feels cleaned, remote, deliberately placed at a great remove from the listener. What with supertech recording, untouchable artists and a brutally efficient music business to serve them, no wonder most of us feel very distant from most of the music we hear. The whole idea of a "roots" music is in some measure a response to that, a cadre of performers and listeners in an unspoken conspiracy to return the power of music to its basics. Blues is one of its purest and strangest survivals. Unfashionable for decades, despite the respectful stardom accorded to such survivors as John Lee Hooker, the style - with its folksy front and deep, dark underpinnings - is harsh and immutable. When I first heard men like Skip James and Charley Patton and Ramblin' Thomas, I felt as if I was listening to musicians from another world. Captured on dusty recordings, speaking an alien language, they felt like masters of a manner one could only look in on and wonder at. What on earth was a "killin' floor", and why was it a "hard time"?

It's a feeling which is difficult to shake off, no matter how familiar the motifs and accents of the idiom have become. Yet some modern performers can tap into the dialect and make it at least something like their own. Listening to the sparse and unadorned music of Kelly Joe Phelps on Roll Away the Stone (Rykodisc), one is first struck by how unlikely a player he is. A young white man from Portland, Oregon, Phelps plays as if he is helplessly immersed in a music which should have little to do with his own background. When he tackles a Mississippi blues staple such as "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", or constructs his own authenticity out of "Sail the Jordan", he might be stepping off a street musician's gig and into his own living-room, recording for the field scouts who set down much of the original country blues on record (and the album was, in fact, cut in his own apartment, "between airplane take-offs and police sirens").

He plays six- and 12-string guitars, sometimes on his lap, in a manner which is undemonstrative yet as fluid and natural as his many predecessors. Though much of what he does is in the supposedly strict 12-bar format, he toys carelessly with the way the game is played and creates his own time and space out of the customary rules. "Hosanna", for instance, goes on for almost nine minutes, a dream-like improvisation that could as easily have carried on for a further nine. The timelessness of the music is its most singular quality. There seems no beginning or end to a delivery which approximates the stance of a man sitting and thinking out loud. His whispery vocals have an apologetic quality, as if he regrets troubling a passer-by.

Phelps can play with fantastic dexterity, but most of the time he prefers to use no more of his technique than he has to, a restraint that is endemic to his chosen ground. For all his accomplishment, the bluesman he most reminds me of is Mississippi John Hurt, the gentle, almost beatific songster who became a coffee-house favourite in the early 1960s. Hurt was originally recorded as far back as 1928 before disappearing for decades until his rediscovery. Phelps sings in the same conversational timbre and unassuming tone that suggests the elemental communication which might be the most powerful gift of the blues: a sensation that the performer is speaking directly to the listener, an intimacy that can seem almost frighteningly close. Phelps has so far eluded much press comment, and perhaps he's best heard without the excessive hagiography that attends every new discovery. In a way, the simple, bottomless music he creates asks to be nameless.

Kelly Joe Phelps begins a 13-date British tour on 20 May. For further details, contact Rykodisc on 0181-746 1234

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