Aside from the immediately obvious, namely harmonica bluesman Charlie Musselwhite, Nashville-based Tim Gartland kept reminding me of somebody each time I listened to Satisfied. I could never place that seeming influence, only that it was somebody I would not have expected. Eventually, it hit me. "It" was the late Fred Neil.

Not knowing the man, I can't swear that Gartland has ever heard of Neil, a legendary 1960s New York folk singer/cult hero whose career drug addiction short-circuited. He moved on to south Florida to heal himself in the Dolphin Project, dedicated to the preservation of marine life. He died in 2001. His masterpiece, "The Dolphins," lives on as the equal of just about any song, including Dylan's, in the golden age of songwriting that was the Greenwich Village scene. With Neil, though, it wasn't just the songs (among them the hit "Everybody's Talkin'," covered in an inferior version by Harry Nilsson in 1969). It was Neil's growly vocal and surprising imagery that conjured a magic which time has not diminished.

Made up of strong originals, Satisfied is a big house of blues next to Neil's, whose residence had a roof and basement of blues, but otherwise rooms occupied by songsters Josh White, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten and Lead Belly. But in his bluesiest moment Neil could have composed "Walk On" (a phrase he dropped into performances on occasion). "Don't Make More Trouble" points up a Neil-like languid wit. Neil's rhythmic 12-string isn't here, though. In its place Gartland has a standard modern blues band: electric guitars, keyboards, drums and his own omnipresent harmonicas. His singing boasts a low-in-the-throat quality that calls Neil's to mind.

I don't mean to dwell too much on this. It's just that it's such a surprise to hear anybody who brings Neil to memory. Usually, blues writing is sort of like its bluegrass equivalent, meant more to evoke a certain sound and to expose -- or show off -- technical dexterity, less to showcase songs that have a distinctive personality that will draw you back to them for consistent delight and insight. Not so here. Each of Satisfied's 10 cuts has its own unique melody, its own individual point of view, its own cliche-free perspective. As you listen, you think, "Oh yeah, that song." As opposed to "Yeah, that's another blues, all right."

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with "another blues." But it's also true that there are a whole lot of those. Gartland knows how to write a song, how to present it, how to say something with it the listener will want to hear and maybe identify with. It's as if he's dug down through all blues' roots and rabbit holes and found a way to keep the music's spirit intact and yet to let it breathe afresh, in the manner of one who is at once a committed carrier of the tradition and a subtle, ingenious transformer of it. Satisfied satisfies indeed.

Colin Linden and Luther Dickinson, two guitarists at home in a range of roots genres, revisit the sounds of mid-century America in the enjoyable Amour. (The one exception is "Careless Love," in two versions [instrumental and vocal], its origins lost in the mists out of which so many folk songs step mysteriously into view.) The 10 songs, mostly in electric settings that grunt or shimmer or wail as the occasion demands, encompass material associated with Jimmy Reed ("Honest I Do"), Ray Price ("Crazy Arms," "For the Good Times"), Clyde McPhatter ("Lover Please"), Elvis Presley ("I Forgot To Remember To Forget"), Bo Diddley ("Dearest Darling") and more. These are all expertly constructed, and each is lovingly reworked in settings that borrow whatever works from past or present.

Linden is a Canadian musician, now based in Nashville. Dickinson is the son of the revered producer Jim Dickinson, whose knowledge of Southern music had few rivals in the music industry. Linden served as musical director of the late television dramatic series Nashville and, besides headlining solo albums, has been a member of the Canadian rock band Blackie & the Rodeo Kings. In addition to his own work, Dickinson is associated with the North Mississippi Allstars and the Black Crowes. Both have written their share of original numbers, but Amour takes them outside themselves and into the rich legacy of popular song spanning the 1950s and '60s. Though of course these songs were written to be hits, from the perspective of the 21st century their link to the greater American musical traditions from which blues and country emerged seem far more apparent today than they did at the time.

These days, when we're drowning in the effusions of singer-songwriters, it's a pleasure to hear older songs smartly interpreted. One wishes there were more of that. Even the most able self-promoting composers aren't consistently engaging; Dylan, for the most prominent example, has foisted no shortage of clunkers on us. Besides, when songs like those that adorn Amour, not to mention the thousands more like them, are already out there, do we really need new songs in constantly replenished supply? To put it bluntly, most of these -- Tim Gartland's being a happy exception -- serve the listener's pleasure less than they do the writer's ego.

A couple of observations in closing: Rachael Davis and Ruby Amanfu each handle two of the vocals, and they are fabulous. "I Forgot To Remember To Forget" (put together by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers as a rockabilly tune) appears in a disorientingly unexpected arrangement, the sort of thing you might encounter on a field recording of ghosts in a midnight choir.