From Bob Dylan to Beck, many white folk-music stylists use country blues as a jumping off point.

        The double bill at the Southgate House Saturday night of folkies Chris Smither and Peter Case was a contrast in styles of two solo acts working from the same country blues template.

        Mr. Smither, who closed the show with a 95-minute set, is a veteran of the 1960s blues revival and has been releasing albums since the early 1970s. His act was the more blues-faithful of the two, given his songwriting is styled in the traditions of such long-gone giants as Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins, both of whose songs he covered.

        A New Orleans native, Mr. Smither has a raspy drawl that lent a measure of that all-important authenticity for which modern-day blues singers strive, and his finger-picking guitar technique was flawless. He sat in a chair and stomped his feet for percussion as if the stage were a Mississippi Delta front porch. When he launched into Mr. Johnson's “Dust My Broom” and Mr. Hopkins' “Jailhouse Blues,” the effect was one of a grand tribute with a reason for being, not cheap covering and copying.

        One of his own songs, the boastful “Love You Like a Man,” stood alongside the classic-blues covers, while he lent a lowdown-blues quality to such non-blues fare as Mr. Dylan's “Desolation Row” and Rolly Salley's “Killing the Blues.”

        Mr. Case, who first made his name with the 1980s new-wave group the Plimsouls, did a few old country-blues covers, including Blind Willie McTell's “Broke Down Engine Blues” and a couple songs by Mississippi John Hurt, the benefactor of a recent tribute-record project spearheaded by Mr. Case.

        Beyond the covers, his 70-minute set had a couple originals based on blues musical arrangements but was mainly standard, post-Dylan folk-rock stuff: a couple love songs, a song about the homeless, a song about the Civil War.

        Mr. Case blamed the homeless song, which appeared on one of his final Geffen Records releases, in part for his split with the major label. “Homeless people aren't buying many CDs anymore,” he deadpanned.

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