Link Wray 3-Track Shack (Ace/ Border)

★★★★

Best known as the early electric guitar hero behind such razor-sharp 50s and 60s instrumentals as Rumble, Jack The Ripper and Rawhide, here’s Shawnee rock’n’roll pioneer Link Wray going back to his roots in country, gospel and the blues.

Raw, unpolished, ponging slightly of farmyard manure, the three early 70s solo LPs compiled on this double CD set were recorded in an old chicken coop on Wray’s brother’s Maryland farm, this primitive setup adding soulful warmth to these gloriously ragged swamp-folk recordings.

During quiet passages, you can hear bullfrogs croaking outside, and the band put Wray’s guitar speakers outside in the woods and miked the open windows for louder tracks. The piano is out of tune, and half the tracks have no drum kit: the musicians stomped on the floor for the bass drum and shook a can of nails for the snare.

The best of the three compiled albums is Wray’s 1971 self-titled ‘‘comeback’’ record. Resembling a down-home rattle through The Wasp by The Doors, a cover of Willie Dixon/ Howlin’ Wolf’s Tail Dragger cleaves closest to Wray’s primal 50s guitar freak-outs, but the biggest revelation is Fire and Brimstone – later covered by the Neville Brothers and Nick Cave – in which Wray howls like Mick Jagger’s country cousin over a heaving mass of banjo, mandolin, slide guitar, smacked-bucket drums and whisky-jug bass.