Most nights, Guy Clark takes the stage like no other singer-songwriter. He doesn’t display any bravado, and he makes no attempt to excite the crowd. Even though he’s a revered songwriter, he resembles a factory worker getting on a bus: Tools in hand, he steps up bearing a perplexed scowl that’s somewhere between angry and embarrassed. It’s as if he’d rather do away with the whole custom of introductions and get on to the task at hand. Throughout his shows, he’ll do all he can to deflect attention from himself; when he tells stories, they’re generally about what inspired a certain song.

On Halloween night, however, Clark was almost animated as he prepared to start the first of three consecutive nights of performances at Douglas Corner. For the first time in well over a decade, he had put together a band. As he got to his chair and picked up his guitar, he looked at a few of his colleagues and cracked a wry, silent smile and arched his eyebrows. Then he explained to the packed audience that he planned on recording the show. “I’m as nervous as a cat,” he confided, speaking as calmly as a man relaxing at home. Clark didn’t bother to tell the audience that he’d appreciate their silence during the performances or their lusty reactions after songs. He just did what he always does: He picked a few graceful notes of a familiar melody and launched into one of the most singularly impressive song catalogs of any American songwriter of the last 25 years.

Sitting in a circle in the middle of the club, Clark and his cohorts more closely resembled a loose-knit collection of friends than a band of professional hot-shots. The hand-picked group featured singer-songwriter Darrell Scott on Dobro, acoustic guitar, and Picasso’s mandolin; duet partners Verlon Thompson and Suzi Ragsdale on acoustic guitar and accordion, respectively; and resourceful percussionist Kenny Malone on “anything he wants to pick up,” as Clark put it.

Clark opened the show with one of his best-known songs, “L.A. Freeway,” which he said had “taken on a whole new meaning since the whole O.J. Simpson thing.” Through the rest of the night, Clark bounced back and forth in time, going from “the first song I ever wrote that I liked” (“Old Time Feeling”) to a couple of new tunes, including the entertaining “Out in the Parking Lot,” which colorfully describes the rowdy and ribald goings-on outside a honky-tonk. Other selections included “The Last Gunfighter Ballad,” “Homegrown Tomatoes,” “Texas Cooking,” “Heartbroke,” “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, She’s Just Leavin’,” and a devastatingly quiet rendition of “Let ’Em Roll.” Throughout the evening, he let his songs speak for themselves, trusting his band, his fans, and his own instincts to act accordingly.

As a figure, Clark perfectly embodies his music: tough and bare-boned, yet dryly sentimental. He packs his songs with old-fashioned masculinity, the kind that rests on honesty, integrity, and carefully chosen words rather than on bluster and aggression. He’s a craftsman and an artist in the best sense of both words; his songs are painstakingly put together, yet they reveal beauty rather than strain. By the end of the set, it was evident why Clark doesn’t bother to aggrandize himself or his efforts: Both his words and his manner offer all the glory a great songwriter could ever desire.

Fiddling around

Onstage at the Station Inn on Nov. 2, John Hartford introduced an ancient fiddle song by recalling an audience member’s request at a past performance. “I sure wish you’d sing something I could recognize so I would know whether you’re any good or not,” she said. Hartford grinned and told the crowd, “I told her that’s why I do what I do—so you won’t be able to tell if it’s any good.”

In truth, Hartford is quite good at what he does—and he even performed several popular songs, including his own “Gentle on My Mind,” a Glen Campbell hit that has gone to become one of the most played and recorded songs of the last 30 years. Some of the older selections were familiar as well: Hartford and his trio performed Johnny Bond’s “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” with delicate beauty until the final chorus, when they changed the words to “Honey, I’ll wear your underwear tonight.”

A majority of the opening set focused on songs such as “Natchez Under the Hill” and “Three Forks in Sandy,” instrumentals found primarily in dusty, weathered songbooks and in the memories of elderly fiddlers and banjo players. Hartford explained his passion for these tunes with another story: “A close relation of mine once told me that she doesn’t understand why I play those old fiddle tunes, that they all sound the same and they all have funny names.” Hartford slid his bow across his fiddle strings for a couple of quick notes, then added, “I replied, ‘That’s why I like them.’ ”

For nearly 30 years now, Hartford has pursued a unique career: He’s a whimsical musician seriously dedicated to old-time music. Although he shares his obsession with many other talented and seasoned folk musicians, Hartford is rare in that he returned to this music after experiencing the full rush of national success and worldwide celebrity. In the late ’60s, he was a regular on the The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and its replacement, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. In those days, the three major networks monopolized the airwaves, and music was still a rare pleasure on television. As a youngster, I rarely missed anything on television involving any kind of popular music. To me, and probably to millions of other young music fans, Hartford was as big a star as The Monkees, Paul Revere & the Raiders, David Cassidy, and Glen Campbell.

But just when Hartford won a Grammy Award and appeared on The Tonight Show, he turned his back on future stardom. Rather than focus on creating sweet pop confections like “Gentle on My Mind” or capitalize on his high profile as a entertainer, he went hustling for the remote peacefulness of the banks of the Cumberland River. Ever since then, he’s followed a decidedly noncommercial, non-network-compatible musical career as a multi-instrumentalist, historian, storyteller, buck dancer, and riverboat pilot.

Beginning in 1971 with the incomparable Aero-Plain and Morning Bugle, Hartford’s recordings have delved ever deeper into a pure, old-timey sound. His new Rounder release, Wild Hog in the Red Brush (And a Bunch of Others You Might Not Have Heard), focuses primarily on age-old folk tunes that have been popular for decades in the Ohio River Valley. It’s a delightful album of instrumentals—most of which sound similar and have funny names.

In performance, Hartford displayed his enthusiasm and his off-center wit, performing the old tunes with reverence while showing a complete irreverence for the conventions of entertaining a crowd. He spiced songs by mouthing wild honks and blurts, playing his face for percussion, and dancing on a slightly raised block of wood. At best, Hartford is an adequate singer, and unlike mandolinist Mike Compton, who provided the night’s musical highlights, he isn’t even a world-class instrumentalist. But he makes up for his lack of precision and tone by instilling each song with loads of color and personality. His fiddle and banjo work exalt spirit and melody rather than flash and style, and the old tunes he performs couldn’t be passed along by more loving hands than his.

Upstarts

Of all the young wise-asses to join the expanding alternative-country movement, Robbie Fulks displays the most reverence for classic honky-tonk and the least reverence for propriety. Blasting the polite conventions of Nashville songwriting may be a celebrated requirement for a punk-country insurgent, but no one does it with a better command of honky-tonk song structure than Fulks.

The Chicago-based singer-songwriter has been traveling to Nashville regularly for several years now, and his name on a nightclub bill still doesn’t do more than draw out a handful of new devotees and curious newcomers. But that should start to change, judging from the strength of his Oct. 20 appearance at Douglas Corner. Fulks opened the night with several straight-ahead originals that had the polish and depth of classic country songs. But as the night wore on, he spiced his traditional fare with punkish blasts of attitude. By the time he tore into “Fuck This Town,” a spirited and hilarious song written in response to the time he spent here as a songwriter in the early ’90s, it was evident that this lanky Chicago resident possessed a split personality—which is a splendidly entertaining trait in a talented firebrand.

Concert highlights included the chilling ballad “Barely Human” and the revved-up “Let’s Live Together.” Both songs are from Fulks’ recent debut album, Country Love Songs, but the singer also introduced several new tunes that balanced heartfelt emotion with wicked wit. Throughout the set, he also displayed a playful petulance with feisty songs that no Music Row professional would ever dare take credit for. In the spitfire rockabilly tune “Hatin’ Women,” for example, he assumed the point of view of an objectionable louse who hasn’t fared too well at love. At first listen, the song simply sounds distasteful, but closer inspection reveals that Fulks turns the tables on his protagonist.

Following Fulks onstage was Nashvillian Tim Carroll, another songwriter willing to take risks in his work. Backed capably by bassist Loren Rall and drummer Mark Horn—both of whom also sat in with Fulks—Carroll showed off his fierce guitar playing as well as his colorful, progressive songcraft. Throughout his set, he slashed raucously through tunes that merged the music Hank Williams and Roger Miller with the music of the Rolling Stones and Richard Hell.

By now, Carroll’s repertoire is as rich as it is extensive, and he’s grown in both vocal character and in musical aggression since moving here from New York several years ago. The trio’s encore consisted of a seamlessly rockin’ medley of Lou Reed’s “(We’re Gonna Have) A Real Good Time Together” and the New York Dolls’ “Personality Crisis.” It provided a perfect finale to a memorable, if lightly attended, event.