t starts off as novelty. Within five minutes of the album starting, you’re laughing. You’re laughing half out of humour, half out of “What on earth am I listening to?” What you’re listening to is a half-cut helium-voiced midget slurring the tale of the time he and Charles Bukowski drunkenly hijacked a diesel locomotive and drove it from downtown Los Angeles to Pacoima. By the time the album’s over, you’re not laughing, you’re discovered that that midget you were listening to died a few months after recording his vocals, the stage is littered with innumerable other corpses and lost hopes of America, and the smile has been wiped completely from your face, replaced by a stunned gape. Hotwalker isn’t just one of the best albums of this decade; it’s also probably the best documentary that the 2000s have yet produced.

A hotwalker is the name given to the guy at a racetrack who walks hot horses around in a circle to cool them down. Little Jack Horton used to be a hotwalker. He used to be a lot of things, carnival freak, poet, stuntman, “Voice of the Great American Midway,” human cannonball, stuntman, friend of Charles Bukowski, preacher, alcoholic, philosopher, and alive. He was the midget in question (or “little person” as he aggressively refers to himself, for an album that rails repeatedly against political correctness they do make concessions for our stumpy brethren) we just mentioned.

Hotwalker is the new album by Tom Russell, except it really isn’t his album. Of the 19 tracks present on this thing he only takes performance credits for nine of them. It’s part documentary, part mix-album, part museum exhibit, part evening spent listening to a rambling bar drunk who occasionally has a moment of clarity which you can’t help but share with him.

The whole enterprise is subtitled “Charles Bukowski And A Ballad For Gone America,” and that’s what this is, an unapologetically backwards look that’s haunted with ghosts. Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Harry Partch, Edward Abbey, Dave Van Ronk, Rambling Jack Elliot, a eulogy for each and every single one of these guys and the America they fought for. As a man who’s written for Johnny Cash, it’s no surprise that Russell fetishises the outlaw, and the whole thing is a paean to playing by your own rules. He knows that all of these people have voices strong enough to tell their own stories, and he lets them tell it. So Bukowski performs “On The Hustle,” exchanging jokes with the audience about his alcoholism. Lenny Bruce asks the audience if there’s any other losers in tonight, before using the loneliness of his divorce as material. So many other voices flutter through, a choir of the damned, and each one has something to say. And Russell isn’t Michael Moore, he knows that the correct place for a documentary maker is out of the picture making sure his subjects get the screen time they deserve.

When he does veer into view, though, his contributions are absolutely perfect. He tells of times spent at Dave Van Ronk’s house, as a drunken Van Ronk would shout at even drunker houseguests, hopeful poets wondering if Dylan had dropped any songs down the back of the sofa, as his wife played the same track over and over again: “LISTEN TO THIS GODDAMN SONG, YOU PEOPLE.”

But the real star here is Little Jack Horton, whose drunken ramblings, recorded onto cheap cassettes with an even cheaper cassette recorder are the franchise here. He doesn’t sing, he doesn’t need to, his life has enough rhythm in it anyway. He tells tales of hijacked trains, of swap meets for Jesus, amyl nitrate and dope and discrimination and preachers on the back of elephants and of a world that just isn’t there anymore. His final contribution to the album, as he proudly announces that he’s tipsy on bad wine, is a diatribe against politicians, the media, and university lecturers, and for Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Hank Williams. For the ordinary man. Because the point of this entire album is that the ordinary man is capable of all of this, Bukowski was the hero to these people because he wasn’t manufactured in academia. And it never descends into preaching, into reactionary politics, it just comes across as incredibly heartfelt and worryingly pathetic. You leave knowing that Jack Horton was one of the good guys.

Track 19 is “America The Beautiful”, as performed by Gretchen Peters. And they’re right, America is beautiful, and it becomes a lot more beautiful the day you buy this CD. And after you’ve listened to it, with each and every single revelation on each and every single track, you can’t help but think of Dave Van Ronk’s words: “LISTEN TO THIS GODDAMN SONG YOU PEOPLE.”