They may have been most famous for foreshadowing the punk movement, but to many people, David Johansen's New York Dolls were the rightful heirs to The Rolling Stones white-boy rhythm 'n' blues throne.

Since then, Johansen has been diligently chopping away at his musical instincts to get right down to their roots, and he's got there in style with the Harry Smiths. Johansen and his band came to Dublin on a mission to spread the music and invoke the spirit of the anthropologist, musicologist and film-maker, Harry Smith, and his legendary Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-album collection of blues, country, gospel and other uncategorisable sounds gleaned from pre-second World War rural America.

Names such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin' Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt may belong to a disappeared heritage, but The Harry Smiths brought them gloriously back to life, ably capturing all the eccentricity, whimsy, casual violence and longing of a musical tradition that's as much about dark storytelling as guitar twanging. Johansen's gravelly, whiskey-lashed baritone sparred with the superb, mostly-acoustic guitar, banjo, dobro and mandolin accompaniment of Brian Koonin and Larry Saltzman, backed up by the slightly jazzy rhythm section of Kermit Driscoll's double bass and Joey Baron's shuffling drums..

Primarily, Johansen is an interpreter of the blues, and though The Harry Smiths are a bunch of whiskered white boys, their performance veered much more towards the black blues style of Chicago and Memphis, while occasionally steering things back to the jangly, white Appalachian tradition. Make no mistake, though, this was no tired old punk dabbling in something more suitably mellow, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths have got the deepest shade of blues down to a fine art.