But success in Simpson's adopted home eventually gave way to homesickness, and his homecoming album, Prodigal Son, was released in 2007.
If folk singers travel well, folk audiences often look more at home, at home.

Folk is, after all, about people. And when folk fans gather there's a sense of community. So it was at last night’s Southbank gig. Part of Topic Records’ 70th-birthday celebrations, it knitted together a devoted crowd.

A crowd determined not to be put off by the theatre setting which threatened to dampen the atmosphere in a set that charted Simpson’s journey from Scunthorpe to New Orleans and back again.


Simpson’s music may have meandered through genres over the years, taking in blues and ragtime and MOR, but right now it’s overwhelmingly traditional folk; not to be confused with folk rock, indie folk, or the likes of Damian Rice.


For this audience it was actually some of the more accessible material that left them indifferent. Simpson kicked off with Blind Willie Johnson’s, Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying, singing in an American accent. Yet it wasn’t until the melancholy yearnings of One Day, about a Romany friend losing his son, that the audience seemed really to be moved, and not until Andy Cutting appeared alongside him with an accordion that the QEH was treated to a roar of applause.


The accordion, and also the hurdy-gurdy that appeared in the second set (the True Stories set) were also a great hit. But for the uninitiated, their effect, especially in the folk dance style is just to evoke a May Day fete. This was particularly true of Done it Again, a broadside against Blair and the Iraq war cast in a nursery rhyme style with cries of “Humpty Dumpty’s done it again”.


But for all his possibly alienating genre-specific stylings, Simpson kept winning back this potential sceptic  with the sheer beauty of his virtuoso guitar-playing, plaintive baritone, and timeless melodies moulded, like the British landscape, by time and the weather.


I may have had more difficulty than those around in losing myself in the music and being transported over time and place, but maybe I am just not ready for it yet. The audience was testament to the notion that it can take years of living to fully appreciate the music.


At least  with the encore, the blues standard Stagolee, when he really started to rock, I was right with him. We were all in a bar in St Louis and it was 1895.