Musicians like Robert Cray aren't supposed to exist in the 1980s. Any A&R honcho at Conglomerate Records will tell you that smart black musicians in their thirties aspire to be Prince (if they're skinny), Lionel Richie (if they're decorous) or Luther Vandross (if they're hefty) and that they've probably never heard of Bobby "Blue" Bland or Magic Sam. The honcho also knows that black blues and soul singers are guys in polyester suits pushing fifty and singing at supper clubs if they're lucky, bars if they're not; the music's out-of-date and unsuitable for mass-market vinyl. Blues today, he'll say, equals white guitarists mumbling lyrics and slinging feedback – you know, the stuff they play on AOR.

To prove those assumptions wrong, out of nowhere (well, Tacoma, Washington) comes Robert Cray – a black soul-blues singer-guitarist who's at home in the 1980s, fashion be damned. After working around the blues circuit for more than a decade, Cray has been discovered by the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Elvis Costello, connoisseurs of American music – and he's finally got a conglomerate behind him. Cray's major-label debut, Strong Persuader, is his fifth album (there are two previous LPs on the independent High Tone label and an uneven, out-of-print debut, on Tomato, recorded in 1978; he also shares the Alligator album Showdown! with Albert Collins and Johnny Cope-land). By now, what he's up to is pretty clear: he's reclaiming, for his generation, traditions that are too important to disappear. And he's doing it right.

Because he plays his own guitar solos and can deliver a solid twelve-bar blues, Cray has been tagged as a young blues-man (he and his bassist, Richard Cousins, played with Albert Collins's Texas blues band for several years). But blues is only part of Cray's vocabulary. Decades after blues and soul reigned supreme, Cray has put together his own tradition. This isn't just the music he grew up with; it's the music he chose to play, instead of funk or jazz or MOR or rock. As innumerable American and British rockers have done, Cray pulls together a version of blues and soul that doesn't come from any one region, building an idiom for songs that tell with conversational directness the stories of ordinary folks.

Cray, his band and his producers and co-writers Dennis Walker and Bruce Bromberg (credited on songs as D. Amy) meld chugging Memphis soul with blues out of Chicago and Texas, throwing in hints of Norman Whitfield's modal Motown sound from "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and even a Steely Dan-ish jazz chord now and then. The band's pretty solid, though I wish drummer David Olson were pushier; the important thing is that they set off Cray's singing and guitar.

Cray has a smooth, melancholy voice that breaks into a soulful, slightly raspy falsetto – there are echoes of Junior Wells, Marvin Gaye, O.V. Wright – and his no-nonsense guitar style puts bent notes and twangs and (most important) spaces where they matter. The precise, pinched guitar tone, which is reminiscent of Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, comes from Albert King and Albert Collins, where Cray got it firsthand. But for all his technique, Cray doesn't show off. He just makes sure the stories get told right.

And the stories are worth hearing. Where white blues-and-booze bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds haven't advanced beyond adolescent macho, Cray sings about adults. Cray knows that previous generations of blues and soul men made their own personas – from the manliness of "Wicked" Wilson Pickett to the suffering nobility of B.B. King. Cray's specialty, established long ago on his debut album with Brom-berg's song "The Score," is telling tales of unhappy lovers, especially lovers who are starting to suspect a little hanky-panky.

On Strong Persuader, as on his 1985 High Tone album, False Accusations, Cray takes the roles of both cheater and cheatee. He used to portray either a philandering guy or a suffering stay-at-home, the victim of loose women. Now Cray has concocted a refined version of cuckold's paranoia. Did she or didn't she, and with whom? On False Accusations, Cray regretted driving a woman away with his own jealousy; on Strong Persuader, he's gone a little further around the bend. Cheating – or the possibility of it – drives his new characters to madness.

In Walker's "Foul Play," the singer ponders over why his lover is working overtime every Wednesday. In "I Guess I Showed Her," a number punched up by the Memphis Horns, he assembles circumstantial evidence ("My suspicion's been confirmed/I saw her havin' lunch with some new guy") and moves out, no explanation accepted. And "Smoking Gun," written by Bromberg, Cray and Cousins, escalates into a crime of passion.

Then again, he's hardly a paragon of fidelity himself. In Walker's "Right Next Door (Because of Me)," which has the most modern-sounding funk groove on the album, "young Bob" hears a battling couple through thin walls. It turns out that the woman was "just another notch on my guitar" and now she's losing "the man that really loves her." He's not quite bragging that he was such a "strong persuader," but he's not going to come to her rescue, either. The damage is irreparable; no wonder he's got the blues.

Other songs are about loneliness that's virtually pathological, territory Cray shares with Elvis Costello and other modern rockers. In his own "More Than I Can Stand" and the fuzz-toned "I Wonder," Cray obsesses over the woman who left him, and in "New Blood," he resolves to go out and find a lover but lets slip that it's been a year and three days (exactly) since he last heard from his ex – or last stirred from his room. For the rebuttal, he complains to someone who's "Still Around" that "you messed up my whole life, why wreck my day?" And the album lightens up with a long-awaited fling in "Fantasized" and the cheerful "Nothin' but a Woman," which states a basic need.

Strong Persuader is virtually a concept album, something that earlier generations of blues and soul men rarely assembled. Cray has blues and soul down to his fingertips, but he isn't some naive guitar slinger up from the bars. Like other Eighties rockers, he's made careful, self-conscious decisions about sound and sense. And with his intelligence, his ear for economy and the mysterious chemistry that turns scholarship into soul, Cray has grabbed enough roots to sound like a pioneer – not a throwback. (RS 492)

JON PARELES