Mark Erelli realizes that he doesn't exactly fit the ideal of the prototypical "country" singer and songwriter raised on a hardscrabble farm in the rural South, plucking out mournful ballads on a $5 Sears guitar in the short respites between long, hard days in the fields or coal mines.

As he savors the reaction, thus far enthusiastic and approving, to his new hard-core, honky-tonk Signature Sounds release "Hillbilly Pilgrim," the self-described "folk singer" readily acknowledges that his upbringing was that of a typical suburban Boston kid.

"I grew up in Reading, about 12 miles north of Boston...my parents are both teachers, a high school teacher and a nursery school teacher, so education was always a big priority while growing up. Reading is your fairly average suburb town of Boston, not the poorest, kind of an average suburban town."

Erelli, 29, still lives and is based in the Boston area and says that, like many of his generation, his interest in music was sparked by the '80s heyday of MTV.

"I was always a music fan, ever since MTV came on the air, I was pretty much watching MTV the first six or seven years it was on, nonstop, and loved music."

He pauses and adds knowingly, "Of course, this was back when MTV was a bit more innocent and musically driven or even back when they showed videos."

During his high school years, Erelli played in a variety of bands, but never really conceived the idea of writing and performing on his own - that is until he came across master bluesman Chris Smither.

"I heard him on a radio station, did not know what the heck was going on, couldn't believe all that was coming from one man. Not the style of the guitar, but the beat, the groove and the philosophy. He was kind of a bridge between the blues stuff that I'd been listening to, like the Allman Brothers and stuff further back like T-Bone Walker...here was this guy doing these very philosophical lyrics, with the guitar, but he was also kind of rockin' and bluesy at the same time, and that just got me right from the get-go. As it turns out, he was playing a lot around Boston, and I would just follow him around. I didn't talk to him or anything, I'd just go and try to sit as close as I could and watch his hands."

Seeing a solo performer like Smither who could dominate a stage turned out to be an epiphany of sorts.

"I always thought you needed a band to even attempt stuff like that. Then, once I saw (Smither), I realized you don't need a band. It wasn't until I went to college and took a guitar with me and kind of sat down on my off time and started to really fool around with it ...it just kind of came out one night. You're in your late teens, you're dealing with a lot of new situations, and you're trying to make sense of it all. As it happened, I just started playing guitar around that time, and it became a way for me to make sense of all that, and at the same time, emulate my heroes."

His exposure to country music began with a high school tennis coach who introduced him to the genre, and to Erelli, it was just another form of music that he found himself attracted to solely on the basis of its merits.

"If someone covered a Hank Williams song, I'd want to know who Hank Williams was, and you dig enough, and all that wonderful history is right there, under the surface. It's a form of music that puts a lot of pride in tribute to the people who have come before you. I just kept digging back, wondering, if I liked Steve Earle, then I'll probably like Townes Van Zandt because Steve Earle is always mentioning Townes Van Zandt in his interviews, and if I like Townes Van Zandt, then I'll probably like Hank Williams because people keep comparing (them) in some respects. You just keep doing that with a few artists, and pretty soon you realize everyone is linked with everyone else."

Erelli is keenly aware that his career thus far has landed him in the ranks of the modern "singer-songwriter," a label that some artists and fans enthusiastically embrace, while others disdain and dismiss as "navel gazers."

"I don't put a lot of stock in labels myself, I listen to all different kinds of music, and just because something's considered jazz or blues or folk or what have you, doesn't diminish my interest before I hear the music. But I realize that not everybody's that open-minded, and some people will hear 'country' and go, 'Aagghh, I don't like country music, so I'm not going to listen to it.' That's where labels become problematic to me...there is a greater truth to it, historically as well. I heard this radio broadcast of Hank Williams...and he was being introduced as a 'folk singer' - Hank Williams, you know, one of the top five legends of country music, as we know him today, was being referred to as a folk singer in his day. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone referred to Woody Guthrie as a country singer somewhere along the line. I really feel like when I say 'folk singer', I'm trying to communicate with other people with my music, with 'the folk'. I'm trying to build community for myself and for others around my music, and through the medium of my music...To me, it's really very much in my interactions with people, and so that's why I feel like I'm okay with 'folk singer'. I realize that if you use the word 'folk' it's like a 4-letter word to 95 percent of the country."

With an ironic laugh, he tells of appearing on a local country radio show recently. "(The host) knew I was more ' of a folk singer, and he said, 'You can come and play in the studio, but don't play any folk songs.' He had great intentions, but he was incredibly misguided as to what folk music was. Anytime you have limited exposure to a genre, it's pretty easy to make a snap judgment about liking or not liking it."

Erelli didn't so much find his voice as a country writer and singer, he relates, as it found him while he was recording his self-titled 1999 debut.

"I was listening to a lot of Willie Nelson one day, and this song ('I Always Return') just came out. It was a completely different approach at the time. I was in the middle of recording this song, and I played it at a show...(Signature Sounds head) Jim Olsen was there, and he said 'Is that going to be on the record?', and I said, 'Well, no, I just wrote it, I have to learn it and play it out, road-test it.' He said, 'No, I really think you should put it on the record, it's really good.' So that was really kind of the first classic-sounding 'country' song that I ever wrote, and by accident, it made it onto the first record."

Suburban kid or not, listening to Erelli talk about just what country music really is reveals the depth of understanding of the music that drives "Hillbilly Pilgrim".

"'Country and Western' doesn't even exist hardly anymore in a popular scale. It's pretty much all mainstream 'pop-country', and there aren't too many big Western stars on the national level like there used to be. Guys like Hank Thompson and Bob Wills were national heroes at the time. I think the reason that jazz got attached to them, in a way, after the fact - if it wasn't happening while they were around so much - is that when you think of jazz, it kind of connotes a more serious, higher degree of musicianship than just strumming out three chords and singing little folk and country songs. I love three-chord songs, I write and sing many myself, but these guys had a level of musicianship and improvisational skills, that I think they could have hung with any jazz player of the day."

He's been surprised - though delighted - to find that of the album's 11 tracks, "A Bend In The River" seems to be the one that people keep asking him about. It's a song about the WalMart-ization of small town America that crystallized for him while driving home late one night.

"I was traveling back home from a gig in the western part of Massachusetts, and there's a stretch of road between Williamstown...and Greenfield, along Route 2 West, and you pass a lot of these little, kind of Podunk towns that are along the Deerfield River. It just kind of solidified a lot of what I'd been thinking about, seeing small towns driving around this country, and seeing things change and us lose certain characteristics of local color and local flavor, before I think we really knew they were being lost. It happened so fast. It's still out there, but you gotta really search for it, and the loss of that to the kind of corporate chain franchise 'big box' store kind of culture...for some reason is just really interesting to me."

On "Troubadour Blues," Erelli pays tribute to songwriting heroes that include not only well-known names like Williams and Van Zandt, but also late friend Dave Carter, whose premature death from a heart attack in July 2002 stunned the folk music community, and "Hillbilly Pilgrim" carries a dedication to him.

"(Dave) was just brilliant with lyrics. He was certainly the best songwriter that I'll ever know, personally. I think he's just one of the giants, in my mind. You can talk about Dylan and Townes Van Zandt and Dave Carter, really, all in the same breath. I don't make any distinction, I think it's only just a matter of who came along at what time. I felt particularly supported and encouraged by him. I know I had some doubts in my mind at first about whether this was an album I could pull off, and I know that he would have said to me, 'You should do it.' I wanted to make sure that I threw his name in there in the same breath as some of these musical giants, if for no other reason than to have people say, 'I know who all those other people are, who's Dave Carter?', and maybe they'd find his music."Doing "Hillbilly Pilgrim" as a labor of love has been rewarding.

"For a kid from New England to believably carry it off, that feels like a big accomplishment to me. I'm very glad that people feel the same, because if I had any concern, it was exactly that - are people gonna really believe this, coming from me? It seems like, so far, they are."