Charlie Parr has an inseparable affinity with his music, a 100 per cent-proof blend of bluegrass, blues and country, with a rock-red seam of rag and stomp, writes Laurence Mackin.

He plays his steel-bodied guitar with such dexterity and grace, it's difficult to picture him without it.

Seated diffidently, hunched over the instrument with a mike barely within reach of his sparse vocals, he is utterly without pretence.

The music spills out from him, a pure steady stream of tone and colour, each note jostling up and off the frets, a whole family of chords behind it pushing and shoving to drop their way off and scatter themselves among the crowd below.

It's a bit of a strain at first to hear Parr's vocals, but what a vocal; with its shaky timbre, evoking dead trees splitting slowly in the woods, it is completely at home with the relentless, if gentle, strummings, slides and pickings from his guitar.

Parr has left the banjo at home tonight, but that doesn't mean he can't flail his way around a fretboard with all the fluidity and deftness of a man who has done a deal with the devil.

The disarming thing about Parr's music is how familiar it all sounds. For the most part, these are not blues standards, but Parr's own music.

He is so intuitive, though, that you find yourself foot-tapping from the off and softly humming a snatch of lyric as each chorus opens up and develops a little life of its own.

The difference between his own tracks, such as Stingray and Jubilee (the title track from his new album, which was recorded in two days in his friend's garage), his reverent cover versions of songs by Blind Willie Johnson, such as God Moves on the Water, and his take on traditional tracks, such as Jesus on the Mainline, is barely discernible.

This is music that pulses and breathes, rhythms that sway heavy and deep, like fruit swung low on an autumnal tree; music that utterly captures the America of shunting trains and rolling plains, of home-made hooch and Piedmont blues.

As the show develops, Parr starts to enjoy himself, and takes time between almost every track to thank these folks for coming by tonight.

As rough as a barn, as much fun as a barn dance, Charlie Parr is extraordinary, humbling and authentic blues country to the core.

Charlie Parr, Crawdaddy, Dublin