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Among the handful of soused baseball fans, Konrad Wert looks like a younger version of Tom Waits: hat dipped low over one eye, suspenders clinging to a worn T-shirt. We sit at the Horseshoe Lounge in South Austin, where the jukebox spins Otis Redding and shuffleboard is the preferred recreational sport. He offers a story with all the Waitsian traits: God, religion, and revelation in a half-empty bar. But his story is true. The 29-year-old guitarist grew up in the swamps of Immokalee, Fla., and his family was Mennonite Amish.

"Music was church," he says. "It was four-part hymn singing; piano was secular. It was an instrument made by man, so they felt the only way to sing and praise God was with the voice. But it was a multilingual church service – Creole, Spanish, and English – so it sounded really crazy. And in terms of my music, there are a lot of roots."

Wert is part of a handful of local musicians who do it for themselves. In his live shows, he goes by the name Possessed by Paul James, and to hear him try to describe his music is an exercise in primality. There's grunting, growling, melody, balladry, oppression, dirt, grit, love, taxes, death. While he mainly played guitar in his teens, pop and rock music weren't allowed in the church.

"There was definitely a lot of me listening on a Walkman," Wert smiles.

He received a grant during college and lived in Northwest Africa, where he studied art and music and started seeing the world outside the church. He moved around to D.C., California, Central America, and briefly lived in Arlington, Texas, busking wherever he could. It was when he was living in a van in New Mexico and met his current girlfriend that the music started kicking in.

"She was so far away from all those aspects of the church," he says. "I started listening to punk; it was the final kick in the ass. And so music has really been a way to connect with people and have a conversation. Not to channel a political or social issue, but something greater."

He's definitely channeling something. Or someone. See, he got the stage name through an accident with the family tree, a combination of his grandfather's name (Paul) and his father's middle name (James).

"And the possessed comes ...," Wert pauses and laughs. "I would get a video camera to see what I looked like when I played at home. And when I would look back at it I would think, 'What the fuck is going on?' And when I played with bands, people would say I looked kind of crazy onstage, like, in a concerned way. But I'm just channeling something higher. A song like 'Nightmare Waltz' [from his self-titled CD], it's a love ballad, but it's the ugly beauty of it, and I connect with that, with the beauty of the ugliness. People have used the word primal, and I've started to appreciate it."

Wert's setup includes banjo, guitar, fiddle, and an old trunk he picked up from a junk collector, which he stomps on. He sings through a regular mic, but during many of his country and trad-blues type songs, his voice dips into an unintelligible growl or yelp before crawling back to a croon.

"Possessed is just ... possessed by Richie Havens, possessed by experiences," he says. "[My grandfather] Paul Wert lost his job as a chicken delivery guy when he worked for Weaver's chicken. Tyson bought him out. So he drove his Ford into a fucking freight train, and he survived. He was committed to a mental hospital, did shock therapy. Music's very feeling motivated."

Other songs like "No Windows" and "The Warden's Wife" paint a picture of dusty, small-town desperation under his plaintive lyrics.

"People say, 'Oh, it's just a white boy doing the blues,' but it's gotta be more than that, because, especially from the church perspective, if you have that on your fucking back, you're gonna have a lot of similarities with those folks. It's a universal feeling, that oppression. There's the roots blues that comes from the black community and the roots blues that stems from the poor, urban, white community. There's a huge fucking bridge there, between punk and blues."

Possessed is definitely the appropriate word for Wert's music, if not an ironic one given his upbringing.

"I'm just glad I get to throw my hat in there," he says. "You know, a Mennonite Amish kid from Florida, you have your own story to tell."

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