Good as this deeply obscure music can be, I’m almost as fascinated by the fanatics who assemble these collections, not just of funk but of soul, punk, psychedelia, Jesus rock, and other forms of 30-to-40-year-old Americana. These tiny record companies, many of them based abroad, are retracing the steps of the people who spearheaded the folk revival in the ’50s and early ’60s, searching out forgotten records, tracking down and interviewing the people who made them, and imagining a mythological American past. Part DJ Shadow and part Harry Smith, their efforts add up to an enormous Anthology of American Funk Music.

There’s a danger, in anthologies like these, that this mystique will overwhelm the actual music. Pop archaeologists have been known to prize a record’s rarity more than its actual vitality, as though a privately pressed 45 of a freshman trying to sound like Sly Stone is more valuable than Stone’s own recordings. Florida Funk avoids that trap: This CD might not be filled with musical innovations, but nearly all the tracks are enjoyable, and a few shine brighter than that. Extensive liner notes add valuable context, painting a portrait not just of the people who produced the music but of the place that produced the people.

Occasionally another part of the Florida scene will bleed into these recordings — Luis Santi’s “Los Feligreses” fuses funk with Cuban music, with excellent results — but most of the album is basic, earthy R&B in the James Brown mode. The collection avoids the slicker Miami Sound of the later ’70s, and for the most part it avoids the hitmakers as well. The one exception is the Oceanliners, who would later adopt a new frontman and a poppier sound and rechristen themselves KC & the Sunshine Band. Maybe I’m falling prey to the mystique of the obscure myself, but I think I like them better as the Oceanliners.

Now that it’s been reissued, I can report that it isn’t the best album I’ve ever heard, but it is a compelling, unflinching piece of southern soul — the sort of record where a song can start with a woman leaving home for the city and end with her mulling suicide as a prostitute.

The disc also includes three early tracks recorded under the name Doris Willingham, plus Duke’s 1971 A Legend In Her Own Time, half of which continues in the vein of I’m A Loser, and half of which consists of decent if unexceptional covers of other artists’ songs.

The familiar account of Dylan’s catalog draws a bright line between his first Christian album, Slow Train Coming (1979), and everything that came before it. The man had transformed himself before, had alienated people before, but he had never made so radical a break with his past. As he put it, “Gonna change my way of thinking/Make myself a different set of rules.”

Twenty-four years later, no one expects Dylan to be a spokesperson for anyone but himself. Yet there’s still something vaguely déclassé about his trio of Christian albums. Fans who’d never shy from the religious records of Hank Williams or Aretha Franklin still draw back from Dylan’s. Don’t come here, we’re warned, unless you’re some kinda religious nut.

Well, I’m as secular as they come, and I think Slow Train Coming, Saved (1980), and to a lesser extent Shot Of Love (1981) include some of the strongest work Dylan has done.

Slow Train Coming — one of fifteen Dylan titles recently issued in remastered SACD format by Columbia/Legacy — is the easiest to defend, in part because it has the most defenders: Even as it turned off one set of fans, another set liked it enough to earn Dylan a Grammy and a top-40 hit, “Gotta Serve Somebody” (the album itself reached the top 10). But even its admirers had to struggle with it. Jann Wenner wrote a glowing review in Rolling Stone, but he gerrymandered the lyrics to make them more palatable to ’60s veterans — quoting “Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots” but leaving out the first half of the line, “Karl Marx has got you by the throat.”

This was Dylan, but it was a new Dylan. He had returned to his roots in political protest, but the politics were now conservative and populist (”Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools/You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules”), sometimes xenophobic (”Sheiks walking around like kings/Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings/Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and Paris”). Even “Precious Angel”, one of the best love songs the man ever wrote, takes time to mention that Bob’s “so-called friends” are bound for brimstone: “Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die?” Kind of like “Positively Fourth Street”, except this time he’s got the Lord on his side.

If Slow Train Coming falls in the Jonathan Edwards tradition, then Saved is much more primal. I listened to preachers like this on tiny rural stations when I was growing up in North Carolina, yelping phrases again and again to the strains of an organ, a drum, and an electric guitar. The record begins with a country standard, the oft-covered “A Satisfied Mind”, but this is no country performance: Dylan is simultaneously singing and speaking the lyrics, lady singers moaning behind him, someone strumming a guitar. It isn’t a song so much as a tense, nearly sexual buildup, one that finally explodes into the title track:

I was blinded by the devil, born already ruined
Stone-cold dead as I stepped out of the womb
By His grace I have been touched, by His word I have been healed
By His hand I’ve been delivered, by His spirit I’ve been sealed

A piano pounds, those singers keep moaning, and we’ve been thrown into a straightforward gospel performance. There are verses here, but at least half the song is simple call-and-response: “I’ve been saved by the blood of the lamb — saved by the blood of the lamb — saved! — saved! — and I’m so glad — so glad — so glad…”

How on Earth did this become one of the most despised albums in Dylan’s canon? Listeners who have no trouble accepting Nashville Skyline as an album-length experiment in country-pop seem unwilling to accept an album-length experiment in black gospel. But it’s an amazing performance: not a literary extravaganza like Blonde On Blonde (or Slow Train Coming), but one of the most spirited pieces of music the singer’s ever set to vinyl.

After that setup, Shot Of Love feels disappointing. It’s a competent effort with a few great tracks, including the one song from his Christian period that’s gone on to become a standard (”Every Grain Of Sand”). But it’s a somewhat scattered work. Secular and sacred songs sit side by side; the man who had just been complaining about pornography in the schools is now singing a hymn to the free-speech hero Lenny Bruce. Politically, I think that’s progress — but dammit, the earlier song is better.

The presence of secular material earned praise from fans who just wished Dylan would stop going on about Jesus. In retrospect, it also foreshadowed the weakest period of the singer’s career, the uneven albums of the ’80s. Dylanologists debate whether and when their hero gave up on Christianity, and indeed, the next decade included a few more songs with religious themes, some (”Death Is Not The End”) better than others (”They Killed Him”). But the Christian period was drawing to a close, and with it arrived another bright line. Not one separating the rational from the superstitious or the sacred from the profane, but one separating a performer in command of his material from one not entirely sure of his voice.

Jesse Walker is an associate editor of Reason magazine and author of Rebels On The Air: An Alternative History Of Radio In America (NYU Press).

Almost everyone in the bar seemed to know everyone else, and the singer seemed to know a lot of them too. The result was more a party than a traditional concert, with Shaver’s band playing loose, danceable versions of the singer’s best-known songs. With Shaver’s son Eddy on guitar, old favorites such as “Black Rose” and “Ride Me Down Easy” became blistering blues-rock numbers; Billy Joe, meanwhile, made sure to step from the limelight while his son took his solos, instead waving at children, winking at lady dancers, and occasionally even leaving the stage to sell CDs. (At one point, during a drum solo that roused more memories of Iron Butterfly than of Hank Williams, the whole band left the stage to mingle with the crowd. Except, of course, the drummer, who continued to thrash with a garage-rocker’s joy.)

The result was, undeniably, a great time. At its best, it was also great music. As the band launched into its second set, Eddy strapped on an acoustic guitar, lending a more familiarly country sound to such songs as “Live Forever” (the show’s highlight, for me). When the electric ax returned, the band did a better job of balancing Eddy’s extended jams with the sharpness of his father’s songs. By the third set, they gave some numbers a second shot, reprising “Good News Blues” and “Georgia On A Fast Train”. I didn’t mind: The latter song, in particular, was much better the second time around, and I’d liked it plenty the first time they’d played it.

By the third set’s end, the night and the beer were having their usual fatiguing effects, and I made my exit, despite Shaver’s promise to bring Rusty Weir onstage during set four. I was midway through a cross-continental drive, and I felt like I’d stumbled into a private celebration, a great little concert in a rural corner of the country, for a working-class audience, far below the mass media’s radar. Given who I’d gone to Poodie’s to see — a tremendously talented singer-songwriter from a small town in Texas, who’d never achieved the fame attained by some of his songs — that seemed more than appropriate.

But few would consider these extremely English brothers the lost fathers of country-rock, figures on par with Gram Parsons and Willie Nelson. Yet artists ranging from Wilco to Dwight Yoakam have cited them as an influence. This shouldn’t be surprising: From the beginning, the Kinks were as comfortable in a country idiom as they were playing rock or blues. Long before the band had formed, Ray and Dave would listen to Chet Atkins records and sing Hank Williams songs together. Country-western influences appear in several of their ’60s songs — “Got My Feet On The Ground”, “Act Nice And Gentle”, “There Is No Life Without Love”, “Willesden Green” — and even their more R&B-centered work sometimes betrays a subtle twang.

The Nashville influence exploded in 1971 on the band’s best album, Muswell Hillbillies, a record that occasionally remembered to rock but was more often content to wrap itself in genres far more ancient. The music was steeped in tradition: the bluesy slide guitar of “20th Century Man” and “Here Come The People In Grey”; the soft accordion of “Oklahoma U.S.A.”; the music-hall cabaret of “Alcohol” and “Holiday”; the Beale Street jazz of “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues”; the solid C&W of “Complicated Life”, “Have A Cuppa Tea”, “Uncle Son”, and “Muswell Hillbilly” — a song Merle Haggard would’ve written if he’d grown up in North London instead of Bakersfield.

Lyrically, the album is built around three angry populist anthems. First, “20th Century Man” rips into the bureaucratic age we live in, a time “Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in grey.” Then “Here Come The People In Grey” tells the tale of a man facing that same bureaucracy; stripped of his home, the narrator is reduced to a militia fantasy, ultimately to no avail: “Here come the people in grey, to take me away.”

On the record’s final cut, the 20th century man has resigned to his relocation, but not to the fate the grey-suited folk have planned for him: “They’re gonna try to make me change my way of living/But they’ll never make me something that I’m not.” And so the singer dreams of the community he’s lost, projecting it onto garbled media images of America: “I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy/But my heart lies in old West Virginia/Never seen New Orleans, Oklahoma, Tennessee…Take me back to those Black Hills that I ain’t never seen.”

Between these three tunes are stories of the people who lived in the neighborhood the redevelopers destroyed, plus the modern man’s complaints of paranoia, oppression and a life far too complicated. The result is that rare concept album which lives up to its ambitions.

The twang remained on the band’s next album, Everybody’s In Showbiz (1972), but the Kinks’ music was beginning to move in new directions. Maryann Price, later of Asleep at the Wheel, joined them on Preservation Act 2 (1974), adding her cowgirl vocals to “Scrapheap City”; a couple songs on State Of Confusion (1983) showed a country influence; and Davies’ recent solo CD, The Storyteller (1998), includes several fine countryish tunes. But Muswell Hillbillies remains the high point in the band’s affair with Nashville. (Velvel’s reissue includes two previously unreleased bonus tracks, “Mountain Woman” and “Kentucky Moon.”)