Ted Hawkins, “The Next Hundred Years” <i> DGC Records</i>

If Sam Cooke had wound up sitting on a milk crate on the sidewalk singing for quarters, he’d probably have sounded like Ted Hawkins. That, indeed, is the manner in which Hawkins, nearing 60, has spent most of his “professional” life, singing to passersby on the Venice boardwalk.

His has been a life far different and darker than Cooke’s, or even most modern gangsta rappers. He claims to be the unwanted son of a prostitute. He’s spent much of his life in prison (including Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm) or mental institutions for a variety of nonviolent offenses. And, in the era of MTV, he wound up on the sidewalk with no more technology than just his voice and a guitar.

That’s how DGC exec Tong Berg heard Hawkins, and, unlike so many people in the recording industry, Berg clearly has ears. He signed Hawkins and produced “The Next Hundred Years,” an album of strange and wonderful beauty.

Hawkins has had moments of acceptance before. His first nightclub performances were wildly received opening slots for Jonathan Richman in 1986 at Huntington Beach’s still sorely missed Safari Sam’s. The year after that, he traveled to England, where he was recently celebrated as the best soul singer since Cooke. He recorded two fine, recently reissued albums for Rounder, with some heartbreakingly sad songs and others that ranged in theme from the U.S. Constitution to the perplexities of oral sex.

Those albums had largely presented Hawkins as he appeared on the street, where Berg takes chances with that simple purity. He gives most of the numbers inventive arrangements, but they are wonderfully sensitive ones. The opening cut, “Strange Conversation,” sounds like a cross between the Stax house band and Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and is the perfect medium for Hawkins’ moody lyric of love’s shifting ways. Other tracks feature pedal steel and cellos, but always placed in the service of Hawkin’s unschooled voice.

Like Cooke, there is a smooth huskiness to his voice, but with more sadness coloring it, and a disquieting nakedness of emotion. Unlike the far-ranging subjects of Hawkins’ earlier songs, most here deal with love or the lack of it, though “Big Things,” with its theme of a man trying to live up to his opportunity, clearly refers to Hawkins’ newfound recording career.

He makes the most of it, pouring a stunning amount of emotion into his own songs, the Webb Pierce country standard “There Stands the Glass,” Jesse Winchester’s “Biloxi” and John Fogerty’s “Long as I Can See the Light.”