Hard-driving, hard-drinking, a bootlegger, scalawag, and musical genius who was dead from drink at 39. Hank Williams? Not quite. Robert Johnson? Not close.

The character in question is North Carolina’s own Charlie Poole, a country music legend who burned bright and hot in the 1920s, leaving behind a catalog of rural music that has been called “the roots of the roots.” A bandleader and banjoman who was one of the earliest of the three-finger pickers, Poole’s repertoire ranged from string band stomps to late rags, to burlesque, ballads, and hymns. He ran it all through his Southern sensibilities, and emerged with a sound that was a precursor to the rambling, been-there-done-that approach of Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Bill Monroe.

Charlie Poole’s birthplace is unclear — some say Randolph County, some say Alamance — but we know that he was born in 1892, was a child of the Carolina Piedmont, and that rambling was in his blood. His father was a migrant millworker and money was predictably thin. Charlie’s first instrument was a gourd banjo he built himself, but even his musical talent couldn’t keep him from millwork at an early age. His family settled in Spray, North Carolina — a northern Piedmont town which would later join Leaksville and Draper to form Eden — and word has it Charlie fell in love with both the road and the bottle at an early age.

Together with fiddler Posey Rorer, Poole started to play local dances and run a little shine — he used his bootlegging profits to buy a better banjo — and soon the pair was on the road as the North Carolina Ramblers. The name was apt: Poole, Rorer, and guitarist Norm Woodlieff played throughout the Southern Appalachians, and at times rambled as far as Montana, Canada, and New York City.

It was in that city in 1925 that the Ramblers nabbed a $75 contract from Columbia Records and went straight into the studio; the resulting single, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues,” sold a quick 100,000 copies and a career was born. Over the next five years, Poole recorded over 100 tunes and cemented his reputation as a rough and rowdy man: one story has him breaking a banjo over a policeman’s head, and plenty of others have him drinking up the profits before bandmates got their share.

A star in his time, Poole’s career was derailed by the Depression, and by the end of the decade he was back in the mills, looking for work. In 1931, a desperate Poole got an offer to come to Hollywood to write for the movies. He celebrated by going on a 12-week bender, an experience that he didn’t survive. Laid up in his sister’s house in Spray, he drew his last breath alone. He was found by his nephew — “Uncle Charles is deader than hell!,” the boy reportedly shouted — with the train tickets to California still on his dresser.

Poole was more a synthesist and stylist than a creative genius. He didn’t write his own songs, but is admired for his ability to grab strands from across genres and re-work them into plainspoken (and often humorous) rural workouts. His career is recalled in a brand-new box set from Columbia Records’ Legacy Imprint: the 3-CD, 72-song retrospective is packaged in a cigar box and comes complete with R. Crumb cover art and a 60-page booklet that has critics handing out the Grammys nine months early. Titled You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me, the set includes 43 Poole recordings along with 29 related tracks from his contemporaries — an arrangement designed to give a sense of the liberal borrowing and creative cross-pollination that defined popular music in the first decades of the 20th century.

To be honest, the songs play a little raspy for my tastes: the rustic scratch-and-holler grows a little old. But the package sure is pretty. Long a local legend, and a cult favorite since at least the 1960s, Charlie Poole deserves broader recognition. Perhaps he’ll get it now, 80 years after he first laid rhythm to wax.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)