Interview: After a lifetime busking on the streets, Seasick Steve has finally achieved recognition

"It's all good." Seasick Steve pronounces the phrase with a weary nonchalance, his languid drawl conveying the unruffled equanimity of a man who's hacked his way through so much hardship that life no longer poses any problems worth the worry – who, to borrow Richard Fariña's motto, has been down so long it looks like up to him. The phrase has effectively become Steve's mantra, his equivalent of Kurt Vonnegut's "So it goes". It's the line drawn under whatever minor problem has been surmounted, the knot tied round the neck of a subject he no longer wishes to discuss. So ubiquitous has it become that Steve's released it as his latest single, the lead-off track on an EP whose four songs all deal with aspects of the extreme poverty he experienced through five decades of hopping freight trains and busking for change.

"Now, me and money, we don't see eye to eye," he admits in "It's All Good". "Everybody always tellin' me how great I am/They just can't pay much," he notes. "Maybe I'm gonna be one of them people gon' be famous when they dead." For many a year, it must have seemed that way. Then an invitation to appear on Jools Holland's Hootenanny last New Year's Eve changed everything. There, among the great and the good of modern pop, the Amys and Lilys and Wellers, he showed how one dungareed septuagenarian with a long beard can transfix an entire studio with just a guitar and a stomp-box that he calls the Mississippi Drum Machine.

It was a salutary lesson in the power of raw emotion, roughly sculpted into words and music, and conveyed with the minimum of complexity. Of all that night's performances, his was the only one that cut straight through the showbiz fripperies and attitudes, to stick its stiletto through your heart. His album Dog House Music, recorded live in his living room and released a month earlier, began selling steadily, and Steve has since become a fixture on the festival circuit.

He has been playing everywhere from Glastonbury to Cambridge – which is where I met up with him, playing to a packed marquee at the city's annual Folk Festival, his Three-Stringed Trance Wonder swapped on a song or two for his Diddley Bow – literally a piece of two-by-four with a single string screwed to it, which he plays with a slide. The performance is peppered with his tales of life in the hobo jungle, one of which, "The Jungle", appears on the new EP, its account of the tribulations faced by tramps and migrant workers delivered in his wonderful Woodbine '*' whisky drawl.

Here in his backstage trailer, however, Steve's tucking into something a little more palatable tonight – a nice Merlot on his rider, by the look of it – though he's still tippling straight from the bottle, swigging steadily between sentences.

Steve was first bitten with the music bug as an infant, listening to his daddy play boogie piano. "I didn't have the hands for it," he says, "but I said I wanted to play guitar, so this old black guy who worked for my granddaddy, KC Douglas, he taught me how to play a few chords, which turned out to be blues chords.

"But then I left home when I was 13, so I didn't get to hear a lot of music. I was livin' rough, ridin' trains – didn't have no radio or TV or anything. But I heard lots of stories. So I think storytellin' is more what I became about, than bein' a musician."

His flight was precipitated by domestic abuse. His parents split up when Steve was four, and his mother remarried badly. "I had a step-daddy who started slappin' us around, and that. He'd come back from Korea with a gun, and one day he threw me through a window, through the glass, and I'm layin' out there, hurt, thinkin', 'I'm gonna kill him.' I was gonna get the gun and shoot him. Then somethin' happened in my brain, and I thought, that's not such a good idea. But it was either shoot him, or leave. It wasn't much of a choice."

So Steve took to the road – like Woody Guthrie in Bound For Glory, perhaps? "I don't know what Woody Guthrie did, but I didn't find it to be too glorious," says Steve. "I used to follow the work around, migrant farm work: shucking corn in Iowa, picking apples in Wenatchee, tomatoes in the summer. And I'd work the carnivals. That's a good place to hide." He liked working the carnival, because it took him back into the towns. "In farming, you're just in another whole world, a rural thing – very boring for a kid."

Being on the road as a young teenager, Steve had to quickly develop a kind of instinctive radar regarding people's attitudes and intentions towards him. "I was lucky, real lucky," he admits with hindsight. "I had luck and radar – if you're lucky, you get time to develop radar; if you ain't, you don't have nothin'. It's a rough deal.

"But sometimes it's good: some nights you'd be out in the jungle, cookin' food and talkin', under the stars – yeah, there was that. Or you'd be ridin' a train through Wyoming, lookin' up at the stars in summertime. But some of it was not nice. So I give the G-rated version, rather than the X-rated version: my brain goes back and makes it all nice!"

Hopping the freight trains was not without its various dangers, both mechanical and human, the latter in the form of the "bulls" – railroad police – who tried to stop hobos riding the rail. "There were a few bad marshalling yards that you didn't want to get caught in, 'cos you could get beat up or put in jail," Steve explains.

During his time on the road, Steve tried to hone his skills as a blues guitarist, even though he didn't realise it was the blues. "I knew it was country, or folk, it just always seemed to be primitive, what I could pull out of it," he recalls. "Plus, I wasn't no good at it! But later on, I needed to play on the streets, so I needed to make a racket. I'd play anything to make a racket, just to get somethin' goin' and make a little money."

By the mid-Sixties, he had washed up in San Francisco, where flower-power was in its first bloom. "For me, it was hobo heaven," he reminisces. "Free food, free places to stay, all kinds of girls around." He hung out at the various band's houses, usually the one occupied by Janis Joplin's band Big Brother & The Holding Company. "I probably wasn't much of a hippie," Steve admits, "but it was real nice bein' there, like a rest place. Everywhere else it was you against the world, but there it was like they had their own little world.

"It was good for a year or two, but then too many people moved there, and the Hells Angels got involved, and these black guys came over from Oakland, dealin' smack and speed, and people came back from the war with weird drugs, and it changed. But until then, it was all good."

As his guitar technique improved, Steve scored support slots with country blues legends such as Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell. "They helped me recognise what I wanted to be, how I wanted to play," he acknowledges. He remains faithful to that form of blues, rather than the electrified Chicago style, which he believes has contributed to the marginalisation of the genre.

"If anything killed the blues, it's white people doing Chicago blues," he claims, provocatively. "It's all middle-aged white people pattin' each other on the back and playin' sports guitar. Young kids don't want to hear that! It's only these young bands like The White Stripes and The Black Keys who are pickin' this shit up and rockin' it. People ask me to play blues festivals, but I won't do it, I ain't gonna support the status quo. I'd rather go out and play for young people, let them figure out whether it's blues or not blues, R&B, rock'*'roll, primitive trance music, whatever – I don't give a shit what they call it. Just so long as it triggers something so they think it's OK to hear some roots music."

And it doesn't get much more primitive and rootsy than the Three-Stringed Trance Wonder, a cheap and nasty Japanese guitar that he plays reluctantly because, as his bandaged hands attest, the strings are so far apart that his fingers get cut to shreds. "But see, when you're playin' on the street, you'd break a string and you don't have the money to buy a new string," he explains. "So you play with five strings, then four, if you wanna eat. One string, if you're hungry enough. So then I play the Diddley Bow, which only has one string. It sounds pretty bad, but it's all good."

Given his primitive taste in instruments, and his disdain for sophisticated technique, it's a surprise to learn that Seasick Steve is also a recording engineer on the side. He saved up and bought bits of equipment, and eventually set up his own studio in Olympia, near Seattle, just as the grunge boom was getting started. He reckons he recorded about 80 or 90 albums there, including the first few albums by recent US chart-toppers Modest Mouse, with whom he also played guitar for a while.

Apart from sporadic bouts of studio work, Seasick Steve has never held down a job for very long, his wanderlust constantly luring him on to the next town. Doesn't he ever wish he had a normal job, I ask?

"I had a lot of normal jobs," he corrects me, "but they didn't last long! Goin' to work every day, that's somethin' you gotta learn to do when you're younger. By the time I started needing to go to work every day 'cos I had kids, I was kind of a broken person, I didn't have that work ethic right. My feet was burnin' to go all the time. This gal I'm with, we been together 25 years now, and she tells me I lived in 56 different houses in 25 years!"

His peripatetic lifestyle, however, eventually ground to a halt some five years ago, when his Norwegian partner started hankering for the fjords again.

"When George Bush got in, she said: 'It's time to go.' Her parents were gettin' older, and she wanted to see them again," he explains. "I don't care where I live, so I was ready to move. But now, after five years, I'm ready to leave Norway."

He muses a moment. "I like it here in England," he decides. "It's all good."

Seasick Steve's 'It's All Good' EP is out now on Bronzerat Records

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