All hail the return of the original rock & roll eclectic: Charlie Rich still doesn't fit in. Remembered, if at all, for his Seventies reign as the Silver Fox of the countrypolitan sound, this fifty-nine-year-old native of Colt, Arkansas, first started bending rules and blending categories at Sun Records in the late Fifties. A gifted pianist with big ears for the mellow jazz of Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton, Rich had also mastered the art of blues singing – through years of "sitting in" with a black sharecropper on his father's plantation.

Except for "Lonely Weekends" in 1960, however, Charlie Rich never quite achieved the commercial success of rockabilly peers like Elvis and Jerry Lee. He had even worse luck in Nashville, at first. Rich continued to develop his singular stylistic mix during the Sixties somehow, despite label changes, unsympathetic producers and a drinking problem detailed in devastatingly frank songs like "My Mountain Dew" and "Sittin' and Thinkin'." Producer Billy Sherrill and the erotic 1973 hit "Behind Closed Doors" turned all that around, of course. Before the perils of deferred stardom and the pitfalls of gloopy string arrangements became too much for him to bear, Rich even received something like his due. Now, after ten years of silence, he's back.

Perhaps for the first time, Rich is doing exactly what he wants. Growing out of a series of weekly jams with a group of young Memphis cats, Pictures and Paintings captures the full range of Rich's abilities – with a refreshing lack of ornamentation. This is a man who can interpret both Duke Ellington ("Mood Indigo") and Roy Acuff via Ray Charles ("You Don't Know Me"), while composing perfect originals in both the straight-blues ("Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave") and Stax/Volt soul ("Somebody Broke Into My Heart") veins. And thanks to his marvelously burnished vocal style, he does it all without strain.

"Feel Like Going Home," long a centerpiece of the Charlie Rich legend, receives a stirring gospel treatment that transforms it from a down-and-out cry in the dark to an exultant, hopeful plea. But more important, even the smoothest tracks on Pictures and Paintings are soulful and revealing; listen to the way Rich insinuates a subtle blues feel into the romantic mood piece "Anywhere You Are." Or the way he reheats his own schlocky Seventies hit "Everytime You Touch Me (I Get High)," serving it up as a lighter-than-air bossa nova appetizer.

Endlessly deep yet effortless, Pictures and Paintings lends needed perspective to the callow genre-hopping of K.D. Lang, Lyle Lovett and Michelle Shocked. Those eclectics-come-lately are prematurely unearthing their musical roots. Charlie Rich planted his in fertile soil, letting them grow complex and tangled. His patience has paid off. (RS 636)

MARK COLEMAN