“Feel like a broke-down engine/Ain’t got no drivin’ wheel,” the singer cries, even as acoustic guitars and bass chug with locomotive-like efficiency behind him. A harmonica darts through the music’s open spaces like a hummingbird. “Been down and lonesome,” the voice, tattered with desperation, continues. “You know how a poor man feels.”

The five-piece band called Hillbilly Voodoo are playing Mai Cramer’s venerable Blues After Hours radio show on WGBH 89.7 FM, but they could be performing after work in a 1920s Delta mining camp. Their sound comes straight from that era, when styles like blues, country, ragtime and pop made their own natural connections on back porches and in town squares, or in juke joints and at frolics. It’s a sound that’s enjoying a burst of renewed interest, if one judges by the airplay of the latest Delbert McClinton and Emmylou Harris albums and the platinum sales of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. And under the stewardship of guitarist Michael Dinallo and singer Barrence Whitfield, who make the blueprints for Hillbilly Voodoo, it’s likely to be catching on in local clubs, too.

Hillbilly Voodoo have done just a handful of gigs since debuting at Johnny D’s in October, but their soulful mix of down-home blues and roots country has held a potent sway. For Dinallo and Whitfield, the idea is a dramatic departure from their well-known groups the Radio Kings and Barrence Whitfield & the Savages. The volume has come down — there’s no rhythm section, no high-powered electric guitar — but often the intensity gets turned up. Whitfield is able to exercise every muscle in his flexible voice, delivering more nuanced performances than with his Savages. And Dinallo’s acoustic-guitar leads are perfect foils for Whitfield’s subtle phrasing. He drops chiseled notes between vocal lines in originals like “Faded Highway,” delivers slow and emotional solos, and punches up the rhythm during the breaks in classics like “Pallet on the Floor.”

Dinallo began assembling Hillbilly Voodoo after the Radio Kings broke up, in March 1999. “I wanted to pull together some of my favorite players from around town to do some blues and country classics and my own stuff in that vein,” he explains on the back porch of his Salem home, with Whitfield seated to his left. “The bottom line is to mix the high and lonesome mountain sound and the Delta sound.” Harmonica player Tim Taylor, upright-bassist Paul Kochanski, and guitarist Steve Sadler (since replaced by John Packer) were drafted. And when it came to finding a singer, Dinallo didn’t have to look far. “I’d been playing with Barrence in the Savages, and I knew he’d be perfect. He has a serious knowledge of all kinds of music, and his depth in country is amazing.”

Whitfield, who’s best known for adding nitro to R&B classics and writing his own high-octane jump ’n’ shout originals, has in fact been collecting obscure country nuggets for years. There was also his two-CD collaboration with country songwriter Tom Russell in 1993. The first critically acclaimed album he and Dinallo made together was called Hillbilly Voodoo (East Side Digital). “I always wanted to be in a band called Hillbilly Voodoo,” Whitfield says. And now that the Savages are, essentially, on tap only to answer occasional calls for gigs, Hillbilly Voodoo are Whitfield’s main musical outlet. (Dinallo still plays electric blues with Johnny Hoy & the Bluefish and the Hoodoo Brothers trio. Whitfield also has the Slim Galliard–inspired Groove Juice Symphony.) “Everybody knows me as a screaming Little Richard or for sultry Otis Redding soul,” Whitfield continues, “but this blues and old-timy stuff, the vocals have different types of textures — sometimes right in the same line. They sail up high or drop down into this real gruffness, like Blind Willie McTell or Willie Johnson or even some of the Fat Possum guys. Joe Tex, Percy Sledge — the soul guys from down South, they all grew up listening to country music, too. So it’s natural to blend these sounds.”

Dinallo adds, “In the 1920s, country and blues performers shared their repertoires. You can hear blues in Jimmie Rodgers, hear country stuff in the Mississippi Sheiks.”

Division came with the arrival of the recording industry, which in the interest of easy marketability has done its best to stifle cross-genre creativity ever since. But Dinallo and Whitfield don’t care. “When we play together, it’s no effort to find the right interpretation of these songs, whether it’s one of mine or an old classic,” says Dinallo. “I grab my guitar, we sit down, and things just happen.” “Hillbilly Voodoo is there artistically,” Whitfield agrees. “Now we need to jell more in front of a lot of different audiences, which I’m sure we’ll be doing soon.” Their next shot: Thursday July 19 at Toad, in Cambridge’s Porter Square.

THE OTHER SUGAR RAY, bluesman Sugar Ray Norcia from Rhode Island, has a new CD he turned loose at the House of Blues back on June 23. Rockin’ Sugar Daddy is Norcia’s second solo disc since he stopped fronting Roomful of Blues, in 1997, and one of the best albums he’s made with his shifting backing outfit the Bluetones, whom he started performing with more than 20 years ago. Back then the group included a young upstart guitarist named Ronnie Earl; today they’ve got another, Mike Welch. And until recently the six-strings were struck by Doug “Kid” Bangham, who played on the disc. Handy-nominated bassist Michael “Mudcat” Ward and drummer Neil Gouvin, original Bluetones, remain in the fold.

Norcia’s elegant, emotive voice is his calling card, since truly fine blues vocalists are hard to find these days. But he’s also an ace harp player, as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science confirmed this year by giving him a Grammy nomination for Superharps (Telarc), on which he joined up with fellow harmonica huffers James Cotton and Billy Branch. Rockin’ Sugar Daddy features a baker’s dozen well-crafted tunes that range from classics like Slim Harpo’s swamp classic “Got Love If You Want It” to Ray’s own sweet heartbreaker “Lonesome Cabin,” which sounds like something harp icon Sonny Boy Williamson II might have written. “When I first started playing blues, I was drenched in harmonica blues. Then I went to Roomful for six and a half years, starting in 1991. I was steeped in jump blues and R&B there, which I do not regret. But deep inside I desired to play harp and didn’t get the chance to do that much in Roomful, where the horn section is a focal point. So that’s where I’m back again — full circle, with gutbucket blues.”

It helps that Norcia’s period with the band was their best since the original line-up with Duke Robillard. Roomful’s constant tours and the blues-chart-topping albums he recorded with them won him thousands of new listeners across the world. He’ll hit the Sea Note in Nantasket next Saturday, July 21, and then the prestigious Regattabar in Harvard Square on Wednesday August 1.

TOM HAMBRIDGE IS CALLING from Greenwich, Connecticut, where he’s incredibly buzzed. No, drugs are not involved. As usual with this hyperactive ex-Bostonian — who led his own band T.H. & the Wreckage for years, drummed behind everyone from Chuck Berry to Ringo Starr, and played a crucial role in Susan Tedeschi’s hit Just Won’t Burn as producer, songwriter, and drummer — it’s music. The night before, he’d started producing Johnny Winter’s first studio album in half a decade.

“It began when his management asked me to write a song for him,” Hambridge, who penned Tedeschi’s radio hit “Rock Me Right,” explains. From there things escalated to several songs, then to producing. “I’m a huge fan, and Johnny came into the studio playing and singing great.”

Recording the album will be complicated, because Hambridge also needs to play dates for the non-stop tour he’s been on since he released his solo debut, the tough, rootsy, and appealing Balderdash (Artemis), in November. The album features his own, rougher version of “Rock Me Right” and 11 other tracks, including the obsessive roots-rock romp “Rachel Fay,” which has been getting play on local Triple-A radio, the commercial format most welcoming to adult-oriented singer-songwriters.

These days when Hambridge isn’t headlining clubs or opening for the likes of Joan Osborne and Delbert McClinton, he’s either in the studio or collaborating with other songwriters. Recently he’s written with Aerosmith penman Desmond Child and former Doobie Brother Michael MacDonald. Also with former NRBQ guitarist Al Anderson, who relocated to Nashville in the ’90s to become a successful country songwriter, plus Bill Lloyd, Jim Lauderdale, Delbert McClinton producer Gary Nicholson, and young blues-rocker Jonny Lang. The managers of Bonnie Raitt and Meat Loaf have called to ask him for tunes. The drummer-turned-guitar-wielding-frontman has also produced a clutch of albums for young singer-songwriters.

Hambridge cut Balderdash at South Boston’s Room 9 from Outer Space studio with engineer Ducky Carlisle, whom he also drafted for the Winter sessions. “I was spending a lot of time there making records for other people, so I’d book a week, do maybe three days on these pop sessions, and spend a Wednesday working on my own album — or work from midnight to 3 a.m. after the day’s session was over. I just wrote ‘Balderdash’ on the tape boxes, not really having anything better to call it.” When the album was finished, Hambridge sent it to three labels. The response was great, he says, especially for “Boneyard,” a gritty blues rocker that features Tedeschi (in one of her four vocal guest shots on the CD) and local guitar hero Billy Loosigian adding his distinctive Gibson/Marshall bark. Danny Goldberg’s Artemis Records bit hardest.

“To be on a label with Steve Earle, Warren Zevon, Todd Rundgren, Kittie, and Rickie Lee Jones — that blows me away. And the beauty of making the album myself is that there was no record company saying, ‘You’ve got no single,’ ‘It’s too rock,’ ‘That’s not blues enough.’ It’s just me with some really cool musicians playing some loud rock-and-roll shit, and I got to write for myself. If I want the chorus to not rhyme, I don’t give a fuck. I really just did it the way I wanted to hear it. And now, I’m at a point where I’m just digging everything.” Hambridge can be dug locally when he plays the Riverfest with Cracker on Saturday July 28 at City Hall Plaza; his band will include Bostonians Mike Welch (yep, the same guy who plays with Sugar Ray) and ex-Stompers frontman Sal Baglio on guitars.