Richard Thompson has made a career of confounding musical categories and forcing critics to strain their vocabularies to describe his music. He has been likened to a "sixteenth-century Jeff Beck" and "a Delta bluesman from Lebanon," by Stereo Review; and he has been called "a card-carrying guitar hero" and "a songwriter whose roots draw equal nourishment from Scottish folk reels and American rockabilly" by Musician magazine.

Other influences that can be traced in Thompson's composing and playing are the free jazz of John Coltrane, the electric guitar explorations of Jimi Hendrix, the modal drone of Celtic bagpipes and fiddles, New Orleans rock and roll, the country ballads of Hank Williams, traditional jazz, and Arab folk music.

The amalgam makes him one of the most striking electric lead guitarists ever. His songwriting, meanwhile, draws heavily on British folk idioms, with other strains evident (mostly American country, r&b and such). He has long been critically regarded as being in the top rank of British songwriters, especially in folk circles.

Thompson began his musical career at the age of eighteen, when he co-founded the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention. The British blues revival of the 1960s was in full swing and, "I was slightly repulsed by the blues revival.... There were suddenly thousands of British kids playing what were really inferior versions of Howling Wolf and B.B. King and Otis Rush.... So I sort of went the other way, really. I think the blues revival and the popularity of soul music in Britain in the sixties really drove Fairport to traditional music."

The Fairport Convention sound ? their five studio albums were released between 1968 and 1970 -- was based on traditional ballads and dance tunes as well as original songs in a traditional vein. But the songs were played with rock energy and instrumentation: electric bass, drums, electric fiddles and mandolins, and Thompson's dense, skirling guitar lines. Fairport's influence can be heard in British and Irish bands as diverse as Jethro Tull, U2, and the Pogues.

In his work, especially the six albums made from 1972 to 1982 with his then wife Linda, the influence of the folk repertoire that was so important to Fairport is evident, but it's wound into a highly personal style. He brings in elements of widely differing musical styles, and drops references to folk lyric idioms, historical symbols, and modern slang - even in the same song.

Thompson's subsequent recordings ? including 25 solo albums - have also met with enthusiastic reviews. His eclectic approach does not fit neatly into any radio format. CD Review noted that Thompson "is a living definition of 'cult artist....' He does so many things so well and--here's the rub--with such a surfeit of intelligence and wit that he's bound to leave the average pop fan bewildered.

His lyrics reflect what Rolling Stone called his blackly humorous, oblique yet emotionally charged sensibility," drawing on the imagery of English folk songs to tell stories that can be grim or whimsical. Thompson told Musician: "I like to think that everything is based on or comes back to traditional music.... [But] it's the hybrids that excite--where African music meets European in New Orleans and it's jazz, or hillbilly music meets the blues in Memphis and it's rock 'n' roll. Cross-fertilization is the exciting stuff of music."

He has toured extensively for the last two decades and his one-man acoustic shows have become spellbinding - he has put a lot of thought into the solo arrangements of his songs, and the performances are tours de force of guitar technique (not to mention displaying a great deal of general stage charisma). From biographies by Tim Connor and Tom Rhodes

Website: www.richardthompson-music.com

Bob Martin opens the show. Martin is a gritty soulful storyteller whose songs have celebrated the hard truth of life in the Mill Town of Lowell, Mass. for over forty years. He recently re-released his classic 1972 RCA album Midwest Farm Disaster, which has won critical acclaim as a folk masterpiece.

Website: www.riversong.com