It feels as if this might be the start of an initiation into a cult - one which is growing by the day. We have found the room in the croft in Outterabrake, in the Shetland Islands, where Thomas Fraser made his first recordings. We have the key fetish objects - the Grundig tape machine he recorded himself on, and the Levin Goliath guitar he played - which we are photographing, imagining Fraser himself playing away, the peat fire burning, on one of those endless winter Shetlands nights where it gets dark by 3pm. Fraser died, aged 50, in 1978 - but only now is he reaching an audience.
It was only when I flew into the Shetland Isles from London via Edinburgh that I realised quite how remote they are. It took me an hour to reach Edinburgh, and two more to get to Shetland. You fly over cliffs to treeless Lerwick, a place with its own bleak beauty. Look on maps of Britain and the Islands have their own box, which is unsurprising as they are closer to the Arctic Circle than London, on the same latitude as Greenland. There are more than 100 islands, only 15 of which are inhabited, and 10 times as many puffins (200,000) as people (22,000). With an average annual temperature of 4C, it's always been a tough climate to survive. As it happens, my grandmother was born there, and my great-grandfather was said to be a traditional fiddle player, and I'd been meaning to go for years. Now, at long last, I had the perfect excuse.
Every artist will tell their own strange story - full of narrative twists - of how they reached their public. But Thomas Fraser's ascent is hard to credit. He was a lobster fisherman on the island of Burra in the Shetlands who as a young man heard American country music on Forces Radio broadcasts from Germany, and fell in love with it - particularly the songs of the Mississippi singer Jimmie Rodgers, a key figure in country. Rodgers was known as the Blue Yodeller, or the Singing Brakeman, and had built a worldwide reputation in what they used to call hillbilly music by the time he died in 1933. (I've heard recordings of tribes in the Congo singing Rodgers songs.)
Fraser would take the boat into Lerwick, Shetland's main town, and order all the Rodgers albums that were available. Fraser's uncle had bought him a guitar, and he proceeded to learn as many songs as he could, his repertoire expanding to include Hank Williams, the Inkspots and Big Bill Broonzy.
From talking to people who knew him, especially his daughter, May (who duetted with him as a teenager), Fraser emerges as a complex character. He was painfully shy and self-effacing. One story has him at his sister's wedding playing from inside a closet so no one could see him. In his twenties he did appear on stage, albeit as a guest for other musicians. But if anything, his daughter claims, 'his shyness seemed to increase and he just liked playing at home' with May and her mother, Phyllis.
At the same time he was adventurous enough to buy a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder as soon as electricity came to the islands in 1953, and he obsessively recorded himself playing country songs and traditional Shetland tunes on his fiddle.
It was his more adventurous, almost reckless side that probably killed Fraser. 'He would often go out fishing when the weather was bad, when he should have stayed at home,' says May, now 50, who has inherited her father's shy demeanour. In October 1973, Fraser ran aground on the Waster Skerrie off Burra; his boat smashed against the rocks and he spent an hour in the freezing water clinging to a rock. He was rescued and taken to hospital where he almost died of hypothermia, signing himself out of the hospital the next day before he had recovered. In 1977, the winch snapped on his boat and Fraser was struck in the face. Again, he discharged himself from the hospital before recuperating and for the rest of his life suffered tormenting headaches, before dying on 6 January 1978.
The nearest that Fraser got to releasing any material in his lifetime was sending a tape to an outfit he saw advertising in Exchange and Mart who offered to turn tapes into 78rpm shellac discs, a service which he used on a couple of occasions. The rest of the tapes were left with his nephew, Bobby, who was something of a recording enthusiast. But they were left to rot until, a few years ago, Karl Simpson, his 32-year-old grandson, got to hear them. 'I don't have any clear memories of my grandfather - I was only four when he died - although I have a vague memory of being hoisted about a boat,' he says, talking in his farmhouse. 'But when I heard some of the tapes I thought at the very least they should be transferred to CD before they disintegrated as a family heirloom for future generations.'
He secured a grant from the Shetland Arts Trust to help him. 'My intention was to make four or five CDs for the family, but when I looked at the costs I thought I may as well run off a few hundred to see if there was any wider interest - there were quite a few locals who knew him who said they would like a copy.'
What Karl thought would be a relatively simple job turned out to be, as he puts it, 'a harrowing task. It seemed to me that on these fragile tapes was the entire history of my family. The slightest false move could wipe out a song. It was fascinating, but at the same time enormously stressful.'
Having failed himself to transfer the tapes to CD to the standard he wanted, Karl tracked down Andrew Rose, a sound engineer at the BBC, who was impressed with what he heard. 'The previous job I'd had was a rich businessman's bar mitzvah recording from 1963,' says Rose, 'but this was something I'd actually want in my own collection.'
When the masters came back from Rose, Karl selected 25 of the best tracks and put out a CD, 2002's Long Gone Lonesome Blues, a country and blues cross-section of Fraser's music, with a couple of jazz tunes and a traditional Shetland reel. When Karl sent the CD out the response was gratifyingly positive, from specialist publications announcing that here was 'Britain's finest country performer' to Radio 2 host Mike Harding, who said it was among his favourites of the year. One reviewer, in fact, talked of 'one of the most remarkable stories in recording history'.
Of course the story itself pulled people in and when I was alerted to it I thought it was a quirky tale of a country copyist, but actually, Fraser transcends his sources. Or as another critic put it: 'The moment I heard his voice crackle across the decades I knew him for the real thing.'
Before long, Karl was getting fan mail and radio plays in Serbia, in Italy, in Japan. More importantly, the publicity meant that people unearthed their own Thomas Fraser recordings - in his lifetime he'd often send out tapes to friends and relatives, and tapes were sent back to Karl, many of which were used on a second and then a third CD, You and My Old Guitar (2003) and Treasure Untold (2005)
One of his pals, fellow singer Robbie Cumming, found numerous songs on a tape that Fraser must once have given him in his loft. Robbie used to go round to Fraser's house to sing - waiting for him even when he couldn't predict his return from fishing. Inevitably, and like many fishermen, Fraser also had other sources of income because of the unpredictable nature of the weather. 'Me and Thomas used to have to act like sheepdogs,' says Robbie, referring to the times that he and Fraser would sing songs like 'You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog' while rounding up sheep.
One of the discoveries on Robbie's tape that proved particularly exciting was Fraser's version of 'Mississippi River Blues', the opening track of Treasure Untold. This was one of Fraser's favourite songs, but there wasn't a take of sufficient quality among the tapes Karl already had. In general, says Karl, 'there has been plenty of excitement connected to this project, but nothing compares to the thrill of placing a long lost reel-to-reel tape on the machine and being the first to hear a 'new' Thomas Fraser song.'
Another first for Treasure Untold is the track 'Beyond the Reef', wherein Fraser hooked up his tape recorder with his nephews and double-tracked himself. It's one of the most poignant of all the artist's songs: 'Beyond the reef where the sea is dark and cold/ My love has gone, and my dreams grow old/ There'll be no tears, there'll be no regretting/ Will she remember me, will she forget?'.
So what was the attraction for Fraser in country music? Actually, several people mentioned that throughout the Shetland Isles, country has been popular since the Fifties, and remains so. 'You have to remember that country music was heavily influenced by Irish and Scots music in the first place,' says Karl. 'It's something to do with the tight-knit communities and tough life the early country singers were singing about. The islands are a place where everyone knows each other's business.'
Fraser's appeal to a modern audience is more complex. For some, it lies in his status as the ultimate fan of another's work. Then there's the fact that Nashville these days, and the music business generally, is so corporate, and Fraser's is the voice of a genuine outsider. Curiously, Americans are now discovering Fraser for themselves. One critic referred to the absolute purity of his art ('Fraser is one of the great, almost unbelievable discoveries of the 21st century'); another to 'a man who used to sing because of his feelings, not for money'.
The isolation of the Shetland Isles is one reason for its singular culture. I met people who'd never left the islands. In Fraser's time, the population was half of that in Victorian times, reflecting just how tough it was earning a livelihood. These days there's more money in the Shetland Isles because of the oil industry - the roads are good and there are bridges between some of the islands, including Fraser's Burra and the main island.
But when I tracked down some relatives in the village of Ollaberry, at the far north end of the main island, it did seem like I'd arrived at the end of the world. My grandmother's niece had furnished me with a number of a local councillor who was an even more distant relative, and the first night at a traditional music 'session' at a bar in Lerwick provided other potential long-lost kin. The councillor's mother even had some photographs of my grandmother's sister from the 1940s, and had kindly found a village census from 1871 that mentioned my great-grandmother. The family rumours that my great-grandfather, Gifford Hercules Irvine, was a well-known fiddler could not be confirmed.
Talk to people in the taverns of Lerwick and there's plenty of strangeness going on. More than one musician swore blind he'd seen the 'white wife', a ghost who inhabits one of the roads. Stranger still is the elaborate annual Up-Helly-Aa, in which a thousand-strong squad of men dress up in Viking regalia and set fire to a Viking galley. Elsewhere several hundred non-Viking types dressed up as everything from ZZ Top to pearly kings. After a night on the razzle, it's quite a sight to see bedraggled chaps in Mexican hats nursing hangovers in the drizzling morning rain.
The Shetland Isles were a Viking centre and the local dialect is full of Norse words, while the wonderfully energetic fiddle playing has the same sparse, rhythmic drive of Norwegian folk music. The day of the Viking extravaganza was also the day of the 'Fiery Sessions' when plenty of Shetland music talent was on display, from fiddler Brian Gear and girl-group Filska to 17-year-old supermarket check-out girl Gillian Isbister (who could well be the next KT Tunstall).
But the highlight of my stay was a tribute concert to Thomas Fraser in a hall in Burra, which featured his daughter May and granddaughter Rhonda, and some of Fraser's friends including Robbie Cumming, Alan Tulloch, Eddie Williamson and the Pottinger Brothers - all of whom had come round to Fraser's house to make music in his lifetime and all of whom became fans of country and blues. Elsewhere in the Shetland Isles they talk of the guitar and country tradition in Burra, something that is almost entirely due to Fraser's discovery of country on American Forces Radio all those years ago. Equally indebted to Fraser are musicians like the extraordinary Gemma Donald - a teenager who plays bluegrass fiddle as if she was born in the Appalachians - who told me: 'I always loved traditional music, but until a few years ago my friends preferred pop and thought I was a bit weird, but now it's cool. More recently, I got into bluegrass and country - I love the way you can improvise around the singer.'
The whole evening was the opposite of so many concerts that seem to be solely concerned with selling records. Sure, Karl wants to sell Fraser CDs, but the communal nature of the event made for a warm and inspiring experience. As the night progressed, fuelled by occasional drams of whisky, the Shetland dialect became more pronounced; 'you', for example, morphed into the Germanic 'du', as in 'Du's in the home of country music du kens'. It was, in Shetland vernacular, a 'winderfill' and positively 'undomious' night.
These Thomas Fraser evenings have become a regular event and rapidly sell out. One concert provided what might end up being the greatest twist in the tale yet. In 2003 an American visitor, Danny Allen, chanced upon one of the concerts and, impressed, raved about Fraser to a friend involved in organising a country conference in Nashville. Karl was invited along with May and Rhonda. 'When I played the songs the audience's jaws dropped,' he says. Indeed American critic John Conquest was moved to call the songs 'some of the greatest recordings of American music you will hear'.
The family got to meet and befriend a grand-nephew of Jimmie Rodgers, Rick McWilliams, a musician whom they invited to perform at Burra. 'It was a nice tie-up,' says Karl. And with the shy fisherman becoming the talk of Nashville, there has even been talk that Fraser might join the Country Hall of Fame, alongside Rodgers, Hank Williams and Dolly Parton. 'We probably have to release the material properly in the States for that ever to happen, but if it did that really would be something.'
Karl often wonders what his grandfather would have made of it all.
'Would Thomas like it? I think he'd want his music to be heard. But I worry I'm pushing someone else's music who doesn't want it pushed. I have pondered all this time and time again. I just hope my grandparents somehow know what has happened all these years later. For me, I've learnt that fairytales do sometimes come true.'
· Thomas Fraser recordings are released on Nel Records. More info from www.thomasfraser.com