Recorded in a hot and steamy single-wide trailer in rural Kentucky, with just voice and guitar, The Trailer Tapes does not sound anything like air-conditioned music. Chris Knight was a singer-songwriter known to practically nobody in 1996, when he sang -- or, more likely, exhaled fiery breath -- into a two-track tape machine. Two years later, Decca would issue the first of his studio albums -- there are four of them now, most recently Enough Rope; see my review in this space on 25 November 2006 -- but Tapes, in its belated public debut, documents what sort of close to fully formed artist he already was before he stepped onto the national folk/Americana scene.

I liked Knight the first time I heard him, but like so many others I wasn't listening as closely as I ought. I thought I was hearing somebody whose "roots" were as deep as Steve Earle and John Prine records. In time it came to me how absurdly, stupidly wrong I -- and, not to be too hard on myself alone, all the rest -- had been. Tapes decisively documents what an original and idiosyncratic artist Knight was from the outset. He was, and is, nobody but his own fierce self.

Next to Knight's, Bob Dylan's vocal style is as tranquil as Bing Crosby's. Even so, this album compares favorably to Dylan's early work, notably Freewheelin' and The Times They are A-Changin', minus their explicit politics. By that, let's be clear, I do not suggest Knight's songs are politics-free; it's there, and it's the politics of us-versus-them class conflict as seen from the bottom end of the socio-economic barrel. It's all implicit, however, if missable only by whatever dunces happen to have wandered into listening distance. "I ain't machinery/I'm a man," he sings in the proud and bitter "House & 90 Acres." A more produced version of that song manifests on Chris Knight (1998), and it's surely not bad, but this is the one you want; it's scarier. "If I Were You," showing up in a band arrangement on A Pretty Good Guy (which had the misfortune of being released -- in common with Dylan's Love & Theft -- on Sept. 11, 2001), is the saddest and most wrenching song about a mugging you'll ever hear.

Except for "Something Changed" (introduced on the initial studio album), the rest of the songs are here for the first time. They're all originals, but you have to hear "Backwater Blues" and "Spike Drivin' Blues" to realize they are not, respectively, the Bessie Smith and Mississippi John Hurt songs you might have assumed they were. (The very presence of those titles, though, tells you something about the genuine depth of Knight's musical roots.) Hurt's "Spike Driver's Blues" is a "John Henry" variant, and so, in its way (pay attention in particular to the first two lines), is Knight's. If the traditional ballad evokes the doomed heroism of a larger-than-life laborer, the present song conjures up a pissed-off railroad section-crew worker with a morosely unsentimental view of trains.

Knight, who lives in small-town Kentucky, has an unblinkered view of life in what cityfolk imagine to be the wide-open spaces where a man or woman can be free. He exposes a world where mostly what run free are the forces of social Darwinism, where anger and despair coexist with bewildered pride in self and place (the subject of the closing cut, "My Only Prayer," which shifts dizzyingly from ambivalence to mistiness in its narrator's longing for his old Kentucky home). As one who also takes up residence in a rural small town (albeit a Midwestern one), I am impressed -- stunned, actually -- at how precisely Knight captures that experience. Well, at least some of it; we do enjoy a laugh or two once in a while, too.

OK, there are Dylans and Prines and Springsteens out there, and God bless 'em every one. But Knight can stare any one of them straight in the eye, and I'll bet you a good chunk of change that he won't blink first.