Usually it's Steve Howell & the Mighty Men, the latter being the exemplary small band that backs him on his explorations into American folk, blues and jazz-pop standards. On Gallery of Echoes it's just him and an acoustic guitar. If you know his music, you will expect the musical quality to be undiminished, and you will be right. If anything, you'll find it a particular treat to hear Howell performing solo.

As I've had occasion to remark practically every time I review an album with his name on the cover, few recordings, even ones I know I'm going to like, bring a smile to my face on immediate sighting as Howell's do. To start with, he isn't like anybody else. He approaches American vernacular music in a fashion that appears simple at initial hearing, or at least the first minutes of it, then passes into something not easily definable. It's at once rural and urban, oldtime and modern, distanced and sympathetic, straightforward and nuanced. You could say, echoing Whitman (and, not long ago, Dylan), it contains multitudes, except that characterization may lead you to believe Howell lacks a light touch. "Sally, Where'd You Get Your Liquor From?" will clear up any misunderstanding on that score.

The album hit me hardest when I heard him sing the refrain to a familiar murder ballad: "All my friends are gone." Out of nowhere, tears sprouted on my cheeks. Howell's reading of that elemental sentiment would have been affecting under any circumstances, but his interpretation brushed against my heart after the recent death of an old friend. Beneath a placid surface deep waters roll on the ocean Howell sails.

If "Delia's Gone" (here retitled after its refrain) moves the listener in even generally undistinguished covers, Howell transforms it into something unexpected, something with a unique perspective, in the curious manner in which American folk fuses tragic narrative and beautiful melody, like other traditional songs such as "On the Banks of the Ohio" and "Knoxville Girl." This ballad recounts a real-life murder in Savannah, Georgia, on Christmas Eve 1900. The victim was a 14-year-old child, the killer her slightly older boyfriend. The most informative account I've read is in a chapter of the late Richard Polenberg's Hear My Sad Story (2015). How so horrific an event should become an enduring, even beloved song is one of the many mysteries of the tradition.

As usual the contents of a Steve Howell disc are about half known (e.g., Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues"), half new (Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Stocking Feet Blues"), to me. Also as usual that passing fact ends up making no difference because the man appears constitutionally unable to serve up anything stale, possibly including -- in the unlikely event the proposition were tested -- the telephone book.

Where Howell is concerned, it helps to have listened long and carefully, to possess out-of-the-usual musical gifts, and to have lived amid special strands of American sound over the course of a long life. Everybody who loves music out of our collective past should be listening to this guy.