Charley Crockett is a new name to me, though I feel I ought to have heard of a guy who’s made 14 albums in nine years. His hybrid of country, blues and soul taps into that sound forged at Muscle Shoals in the late Sixties and Seventies, with smouldering horns and searing blues guitar matched to a country twang.

Crockett is nothing if not prolific, probably because he’s got a congenital heart condition that’s already required open heart surgery and he’s living, in the words of one of his own songs, on Borrowed Time.

He grew up a hip-hop fan and started out as a blues musician back in 2015; since then he’s alternated his self-penned albums like $10 Cowboy – his latest – with country cover albums released under the pseudonym of Lil’ G.L.

He’s an interesting character once you get past the PR spin claiming he’s a “distant relative of Davy Crockett.”

Born 40 years ago in the same Texas border town as Freddy Fender, he was raised in a trailer park by a single mother who sang the blues in her spare time, and he was introduced by New Orleans brass bands by an uncle who lived in the French Quarter.

After school he started busking in the Crescent City before moving to New York to sing – and live – on the streets and subways, followed by spells busking in Paris, Spain and Morocco, returning to work on farms in Northern California before rejoining his mom in Dallas, Texas.

His latest album is, by my reckoning, his 14th, though there have also been standalone singles including the topical Killers Of The Flower Moon – inspired, like Scorsese’s film, by David Grann’s book about the Osage murders – and a duet with Willie Nelson called That’s What Makes The World Go Around.

At a time when authentic country music has become a nostalgic niche overpowered by watered-down pop-country from Nashville, Charley Crockett is the real deal.