Yet his strongest and longest association was with another small-town maverick from the Deep South, guitarist Davey Williams, who got his start playing hard-core blues with the legendary Johnny Shines.

"Davey's from Eutaw, Alabama," Cartwright said. "It's like Midnight, Mississippi, where I'm from. You can't get farther away than there. It's like the end of the world, without being the end of anything."

Still, Cartwright takes pride in his Southern roots.

"I think you'll find most of the great music in the U.S. comes from the South. And the South has also produced some of our most amazing writers. The old joke in Mississippi was that there were more people who could write well than there were people who could read what they wrote. But that's not true anymore."

After New York, Cartwright headed back to the South for a few years, enjoying a stay in Memphis.

"I felt very comfortable and familiar there," he says. "I could pass as a local, which I can't do in Minnesota."

Yet he's also happy on the Midwest tundra, the home of his wife, Anne Elias, a visual artist and poet.

"My wife has family here in Minnesota. And the schools are really good," said Cartwright, a devoted dad whose son, Ray, is a Twins fan.

A slew of new records

Although his drawl gives him away and his Twin Cities progress was slow at first, Cartwright suddenly seems to fit in amazingly well on the local scene. He has a slew of new releases, some with Curlew, some with newfound friends.