THE blues played Texas-style echoes the nature of the terrain… gritty and time-worn, but above all permeated with an overriding sense of bleakness.

Buddy Whittington is a son of the Lone Star state and – other than the surviving Vaughan brother – is probably the world’s greatest exponent of a sound that taps directly into the musical psyche of his homeland.

This is a music that slices deep into the emotions… like a surgeon Whittington cuts everything away, leaving just the bare bones.

And performing this surgery are his trademark, scalpel-sharp 1963 Stratocaster and Lentz guitars, powered by a spiky, slightly overdriven Dr Z amplifier. Yes indeed people, this is surely blues… but not as some of us will have known it.

The music comes thick and fast, those bluer-than-blue notes probing even the darkest corners of the hall. The listener is taken on a journey from the Texas boogie nights when the 14-year-old Whittington was learning his trade playing the blood-and-guts joints around Dallas and Forth Worth to the eventual link-up with Britain’s legendary John Mayall.

It is an eventful odyssey. We travel along the endless red dust tracks of backwoods Texas, a span that stretches from the T-Bone Shuffle finally to be granted the key to the main highway with tracks from that great Whittington opus Six String Svengali.

Yet throughout, there are echoes of other days, the spirits of men such as Texas blues players Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb and Albert Collins never being far away… men who also had wit, irony, self-deprecation but above all the urge to bear their souls to audiences great and small.

Whittington’s songs focus on the usual, time-honoured preoccupations – women, bad luck and even worse whiskey – but they are nevertheless very much of the present.

Please Send Me Someone to Love, Baby You Got Me Licked and the utterly unambiguous I Got the Itch but I Ain’t Got the Scratch are all quite obviously forged in the heat, smoke and sweat of south-western roadhouses and jukes.

Texas Trios was also illuminating, a veritable role call of those living and dearly departed Lone Staters who have not so much crossed the Styx rather the Rio Grande.

And his debt to Mayall is freely acknowledged with a disarming honesty. There is little doubt that the release of 70th Birthday Concert in 2003 – in honour of the great man – quite obviously also marked a milestone for both Whittington and his mentor.

Texas blues, unlike jump-jive, has yet to really make its mark on this side of the pond. Buddy Whittington provides a larger-than-life reason why this situation is about to change.