More than 9,000 miles separate the Mississippi Delta from CW Stoneking's Australian homeland.

But listening to his albums King Hokum and Jungle Blues is like stepping back 80 years to the time when artists like Robert Johnson, Son House and Charlie Patton were being recorded in rundown hotel rooms in the southern state.

"My parents both came from the States," says 36-year-old Chris William Stoneking from his Melbourne home.

"My father had a big collection of music, so I was able to hear all different things.

"I didn't think about playing the music until I finished school.

I was gigging around and working as a guitar player when I fell in with some guys who were into that old blues, and that was when I first started concentrating on it."

Having played the old classics for many years he began to write his own material inspired by the greats.

But although the records have the authentic feel of the deep South in the 1930s, Stoneking can't be accused of ripping off a particular artist or style.

"I get inspiration from all different elements," he says. "There's jazz stuff in there, Caribbean, lots of chord prog- ressions from different types of music, just given a blues sound or blues structure.

"That's the way early blues was anyway, it was such a wide range of styles and approaches from artist to artist. It was much less homogenised, as music today has become -- particularly the blues. Electric blues today all sounds the same to me."

Examples of the experimentation of the 1930s can be seen in the use of the dobro guitar in the -- then burgeoning -- country and western form, or the different percussion found on drum kits, which were then only ten to 15 years old.

"People were using Chinese cymbals and Turkish toms,"

says Stoneking. "That idea really appealed to me."

Another thread which runs through his music is his use of tall tales -- or as he puts it, "hokum" -- in his lyric-writing.

"The 1930s was a real vaudeville era," he says. "When you read books about artists like Bessie Smith, who everybody knows as a blues singer, you realise she used to do comedy routines within those shows. Lots of blues records have comedy elements, with spoken word intros to them."

The most obvious hokum on the 2008 Jungle Blues album is the title track, which tells the story of his band being shipwrecked off the African coast.

His first album, King Hokum, recorded in 2006, was based wholly around Stoneking and his guitar, a format he stuck to when touring without the burden of amps.

For the follow-up he expanded his sound to incorporate piano and brass -- bringing together the Primitive Horn Orchestra from old friends on the music scene, who now tour with him.

"I wanted to make the songs how they had always been in my head," he says.

He denies using any trickery to make the authentic-sounding records.

"If the instrumentation is old it will sound like that," he says. "We haven't used any electronic keyboards or amplified instruments.

"I go for a natural, dry sound. Combined with the old-fashioned music it makes people think of an old record, but when you listen to mine next to an old 78 single it's not the same at all."

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