Seasick Steve is recounting a story, something he’s very good at. He was living in California, as he tells it, aged around 14, named plain old Steve Wold, and his mum’s new husband didn’t like him very much. He’d beat young Steve and swear at him. One day he went too far: he threw Steve through his bedroom window (it was closed). As he lay in the yard, picking glass out of his hide, Steve resolved he was gonna teach him a lesson. He was gonna get him a gun and shoot this guy. Then, in the midst of his adolescent rage, a moment of clarity. If he shoots the guy, he goes to jail for a very long time.

So Steve packs his bag, sneaks out of the house, hits the road and gets going. And keeps going. He travels around America, jumping trains and hitching rides, doing seasonal farm work and, occasionally, jail time. And, somewhere along the way, he starts playing music on street corners for nickels and dimes. Steve may have started out as the littlest hobo – now he’s a broad, sturdy man covered in tattoos – but he has became the most extraordinary hobo-turned-musical-phenomenon of 2008.

His remarkable, picaresque journey began 53 years ago. Or 43 years ago, depending on how you do your research. His real age is one of the few things Seasick Steve won’t tell you. “Ah, I ain’t gonna say,” is his good-natured, drawled response to queries about whether he’s nearer 57 or 67. With his long grey beard and permanently affixed John Deere cap, it’s hard to tell the vintage of this blisteringly impressive blues maestro. “I feel a little bad luck there,” he continues. “It’s probably silly, but I feel like keeping that one to myself, then maybe I’ll stay alive a little longer.” This isn’t that silly. Four years ago, Steve had a heart attack. Luckily, he made it to the hospital in ten minutes. Any longer and he’d have been dead.

Anyway, now Steve has finished telling the story of how he began his travelling life. He’s sitting on the main Pyramid Stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, and it’s around lunchtime. The organisers will later tell Steve that 65,000 people watched his set. He begins Dog House Boogie, from 2006’s Dog House Music, the album that introduced him to British audiences. He moves on to Chiggers, which is on the new album, I Started Out with Nothin’ and I Still Got Most of It Left. It’s just him, his “nasty old guitar” with the three strings, his wild-limbed and wild-haired drummer, and his minimal but powerful blues racket and howl. It’s like the Dukes of Hazzard’s grandpa meets the White Stripes.

Seasick Steve is an old-timer enjoying huge acclaim from young audiences but unlike, say, Neil Diamond, all this is brand new to him. “It ain’t no different,” Steve says of playing such huge events. The performance skills he learnt on street corners are still working for him. “I just do the same thing. It don’t really matter how many people are there, I just talk to them like there’s ten people there.”

He gets out his diddley bow. It’s even more primitive, even nastier, than his guitar. It only has one string, fastened to a hunk of wood. Making a virtue, as ever, of circumstance – a trait that stood him in good stead in his homeless years – he conjures up a ferocious sound, and a tuneful one, from this so-called instrument.

A few weeks later, I meet this old-time repository of genuine American blues at his latest home – in Norfolk. As we pull up at his rented cottage nestled in farmland, he tells me that he and his Norwegian wife of 27 years, Elizabeth, have recently relocated to the area from Norway. It is, approximately, the couple’s 57th home.

It’s hard to pin down the exact chronology and timeline of his remarkable life. But it seems that after leaving home in his teens, Seasick Steve – he acquired the nickname fairly recently, after a troublesome ferry crossing between Norway and Denmark – travelled around the US for a decade or so. He was a genuine Boxcar Willie, using trains to travel to seasonal farm work picking artichokes or fruit. On the trains, “You can live in a different world, stay way from the po-lice. I hitchhiked too, but then you’re a little bit more visible. When I left home I was too young to be on my own so the po-lice would take you away. Try to get you some foster care. But when you’re 14, 15, 16, ain’t no one want no kid that old. So then you just end up sitting inside some institution. I did get caught, too, sometimes,” he says, chuckling at the memory. “Then I’d get out and, wooosh, I was gone. I was like a professional, they didn’t hold me too good!”

He admits to spending time behind bars. “I got arrested really a lot for vagrancy. But I didn’t give a s***. Go to jail for a few days or a week or so, get to eat.” He laughs his gravelly laugh.

In the late Sixties, Steve Wold pitched up in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. By now he was supplementing his meagre income by busking, but few in the epicentre of the hippy revolution cared much for Steve’s blues and country music. Still, the hobo lifestyle and the new counter-culture shared some enthusiasms: “I was like, wooh, free food, free places to live, free everything. Hobo heaven!”

He got to know Janis Joplin, and would hang out at her house. “I reckon she was the greatest. She would bleed for you,” he says of the legendary rock’n’blues singer. “She turned herself inside out when she played. For me, that’s what I look for in music: people ripping themselves inside out.”

In the early Seventies, Steve decided it was time to come in from the margins of society. “I stopped then, in a way, that kind of life, living rough. But travelling, I never stopped.” One reason was he had a new wife, and she was less enamoured of the itinerant life. “She was less enamoured, period,” he says with a dry laugh. But still, after spending time in California, they moved to Paris for a couple of years. While his first wife was pregnant with their first child, Steve was busking on the Métro. “It was rough. Playing down in the streets, hanging diapers out the window of the hotel, cleaning them in the bidet.” Back in the States they had a second child. “I was nuts – I didn’t care if I had kids or not, we move! We lived in a car, moved to this hotel… I ain’t so proud of all that, but that’s the way it is.”

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Vote for the Breakthrough Award winner
• David Tennant back as Hamlet after back surgery
• Matt Smith is the new Dr Who