Steve Wold's life story is the stuff of cowboy movies and warped American dreams. He left home at 13, having barely resisted the temptation to shoot his stepfather, and spent the next several years as a hobo, travelling America by freight, sleeping in jail and busking for food. Somewhere down the line he became musician and producer Seasick Steve. Last year he released a solo album, Doghouse Blues, and now he is selling out London venues and has women offering to have his babies. Hollywood, or at least daytime TV, surely beckons.

Imagine Jack White as a grizzled sixtysomething sporting dungarees and a salt-and-pepper beard, add Robbie Williams's showmanship, and there is Seasick Steve: a self-styled "song-and-dance man" who plays the blues with the aggressive fury of a punk band, and punk with the dazzling precision and loping grace of the blues. What sets Wold apart from whippersnapper White is that every chord he strikes, every word he sings, bears the bittersweet tang of real experience. "Listen to that low note," he says during Hobo Low. "That's how low I was feeling."

A great fan of the literal, Wold spends happy minutes explaining the stories behind his lyrics, only for those lyrics to use exactly the same phrases as the explanation. The music follows suit: Salem Blues tells of the night he spent 13 hours failing to hitch a ride in the snow in Salem, while his fingers shiver like chattering teeth on the guitar strings. A song about "chiggers", flesh-eating insects found in the American south, burrows and nibbles before exploding as though scratching a violent itch. Wold does not call himself a blues musician because he fears the blues are seen as dusty, old stuff. In his hands, they remain thrillingly vital and alive.

· At the Cockpit, Leeds (0113-244 1573), on November 12. Then touring.