Loudon Wainwright III

In December 2007, Connette and Wainwright started talking about recording Charlie Poole songs, and in May 2008, they began that project. "I thought he'd feel a strong connection to the style and the directness," said Connette, "but I wasn't prepared for how it worked out." It worked out well: The result was a two-CD set, High Wide & Handsome, released in August 2009.

While he acknowledges the parallels with Poole, Wainwright is less sanguine about the subject than Connette. "I'm a singer, I'm a traveler; I've been running around the country for years," said Wainwright, "but I'm a songwriter; that's a difference."

Although he grew up in Bedford, north of New York City, and is identified with the Northeast folk scene, Wainwright is apparently a Southerner at heart. "I was born in North Carolina," he said. "My mother's from south Georgia. You can't get the South out of you."

Poole was born about two hours northeast of and 54 years before Wainwright in Spray, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. He worked in the textile mills before forming the North Carolina Ramblers in 1917. In 1925, the group had a big hit with "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down Blues," a recording made in New York with Columbia Records. For the next five years, Poole was immensely popular. Although he was not a songwriter, he recorded definitive versions of songs that became not only hits in his own day, but pivotal inspirations for the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

"I didn't listen to Charlie Poole until the 1970s," recalled Wainwright. "Patrick Sky played me a Charlie Poole song, and then I went out and bought his music on County Records, which was the source in those days. They put out obscure country."

It was the Holy Modal Rounders recording of "The Flop Eared Mule" -- originally made famous by Poole -- that helped Wainwright find a way from his upbringing to his heritage. "The Holy Modal Rounders were not unlike myself: white, suburban, middle-class guys." And he loved their crazed string-band treatment of the music. The Rounders revived the comic and dramatic element of the music that Poole had emphasized.