If recent years don"t amount to a golden age for acoustically inclined, blues-based singer-songwriters, they at least give the impression of fine, burnished copper. Or so this tribute to "grit lit" novelist Larry Brown (who died in 2004) would argue. Brown loved and celebrated these voices, writing liner notes for Blue Mountain and an extended essay on Robert Earl Keen, among others. In his fiction he made the sometimes dire, sometimes comic humanism of real lives sing in vigorous and dusty rhythms. This gathering of admirers and fellow travelers (some of whom, like Cary Hudson and T-Model Ford, hail from Brown"s Mississippi) manages the same feat. With a spirit of indolent story telling and homemade rock, the set focuses on alternate and live takes, with a sound as unvarnished as Brown"s diction. Scott Miller offers an unreleased, laid-back but still rocking version of "Thirsty," T-Model Ford gets as low and mean as he ever has on the Muddy Waters signature number "Love Me," and legendary Ardent producer Jim Dickinson warbles sweetly through Bob Dylan"s "I"ll Remember You." The collection only stumbles with novelist Madison Smartt Bell"s clichéd and choked tribute to getting drunk with the author. Some of the grittiest and best moments, though, come from the lesser-known voices: Caroline Herring sings a tough, honest ballad of self-reliance, Ben Weaver "sings a pretty song to an ugly world" with a voice caked in mud, Tim Lee and Susan Bauer Lee do a mean John Doe/Exene Cervenka impersonation, and Brent Best (formerly of Slobberbone, now of the Drams) unwinds a riveting, wide-open story of a young boy"s coming of age in a small town. Producer Tim Lee hoped the collection would play like the kind of mix tape Brown loved to pop in his truck on long drives through Mississippi. He and the rest of these raw kindred spirits have more than succeeded. --Roy Kasten