for mass-market vinyl. Blues today, he'll say, equals white guitarists mumbling lyrics and slinging feedback – you know, the stuff they play on AOR.

To prove those assumptions wrong, out of nowhere (well, Tacoma, Washington) comes Robert Cray – a black soul-blues singer-guitarist who's at home in the 1980s, fashion be damned. After working around the blues circuit for more than a decade, Cray has been discovered by the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Elvis Costello, connoisseurs of American music – and he's finally got a conglomerate behind him. Cray's major-label debut, Strong Persuader, is his fifth album (there are two previous LPs on the independent High Tone label and an uneven, out-of-print debut, on Tomato, recorded in 1978; he also shares the Alligator album Showdown! with Albert Collins and Johnny Cope-land). By now, what he's up to is pretty clear: he's reclaiming, for his generation, traditions that are too important to disappear. And he's doing it right.

Because he plays his own guitar solos and can deliver a solid twelve-bar blues, Cray has been tagged as a young blues-man (he and his bassist, Richard Cousins, played with Albert Collins's Texas blues band for several years). But blues is only part of Cray's vocabulary. Decades after blues and soul reigned supreme, Cray has put together his own tradition. This isn't just the music he grew up with; it's the music he chose to play, instead of funk or jazz or MOR or rock. As innumerable American and British rockers have done, Cray pulls together a version of blues and soul that doesn't come from any one region, building an idiom for songs that tell with conversational directness the stories of ordinary folks.

Cray, his band and his producers and co-writers Dennis Walker and Bruce Bromberg (credited on songs as D. Amy) meld chugging Memphis soul with blues out of Chicago and Texas, throwing in hints of Norman Whitfield's modal Motown sound from "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and even a Steely Dan-ish jazz chord now and then. The band's pretty solid, though I wish drummer David Olson were pushier; the important thing is that they set off Cray's singing and guitar.

Cray has a smooth, melancholy voice that breaks into a soulful, slightly raspy falsetto – there are echoes of Junior Wells, Marvin Gaye, O.V. Wright – and his no-nonsense guitar style puts bent notes