I will consider myself truly blessed if I come upon a better new song this year than "Missouri River Hat Blowing Incident." In the course of a music-rich existence, thousands of songs, good, bad and indifferent, have passed through ear and brain, but I have never heard one quite like this. For most of its duration it seems (for all the beauty of its melody) trivial and pointless, perhaps composed to make the joking point that you can write a song about literally anything. Then the last verse arrives, and suddenly you're drawing in your breath and your eyes are no longer dry. It turns out that the writer had something profound in mind all along, and you won't recover immediately.

RB Morris is like that, I guess. Before this album showed up in my mail, he was just a name to me, more or less, the single exception being a song on an anthology in my possession. Luminaries such as Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and the late John Prine, all of whom know something about songwriting, have praised him. Prine, Earle and Marianne Faithfull have covered his songs. Still, even musically sophisticated friends to whom I've mentioned him haven't recognized the name. No wonder Williams has judged Morris to be "the greatest unknown songwriter in the country."

The man tells a story with the best of them. A folk-based singer-songwriter, he stands in the line of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and everybody of note they influenced; yet his perspective is unexpected even when he addresses so well-worn a topic as ramblin', the theme of the bulk of the cuts here. Apparently, the songs draw from memories of youthful hitchhiking through the Western states. He mentions a road companion named "Dustbo," possibly Morris's Cisco Houston, or maybe a dog.

Produced by the reliable Bo Ramsey (noted for his work with Greg Brown), Going Back to the Sky is a model of dazzlingly crafted words, attention-grabbing stories and open-hearted melodies. The title number could be about death or renewal or the meandering course of an intense romantic relationship. "Once in a Blue Moon" calls to mind one of Elvis's more memorable love ballads, while "Under the Cigar Trees" is an irresistible goof, an artifact extracted from a parallel universe where calypso is a Mexican genre, sung in English. By way of contrast "Montana Moon" -- a sinister, suspenseful talking blues about seeking a filling station on a bitterly cold country night, of the sort in which people end up freezing to death in their cars -- reminds me of my own terrifying experience along this line.

The songs roll easily out of Morris's mouth but are too infused with nuance and meaning to have been snatched casually out of the ether. Wisdom, humor, tradition, originality, reverence for the landscape and an unsentimental love of living amidst one's fellow humans all join to create this impressively out of the ordinary recording.