Longtime favorite at the Proctors-based Eighth Step Coffeehouse, the ambitious, deeply rooted troubadour Guy Davis reached way back Saturday into both family history and the venerable music styles long favored for fables of death and enduring, of love and betrayal.

Davis learned to craft a creative life from celebrated actor parents Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; and how to link history to art in the folk music summer camp Pete Seeger’s brother John operated upstate from Davis’s Manhattan upbringing.

Before all that, Davis’s people were southern folk, and Georgia relatives told of a woman murdered there, a woman they knew and whose killer they suspected and feared.

Saturday before a small, rapt, happy-to-sing-along crowd, Davis showed no fear, decrying crimes then and now, with interludes of love and lust to sweeten and spice things.

The vintage “Driving Wheel” drove us back in time before Davis told his recently-written tale of murder in “Sugarbelly,” his concocted name of the victim and title of his new CD and a stage play under construction. He sang it in both his actor-sharp story-teller’s perfect diction and several character voices, including God’s.

So it went in his two-set show; weaving together bedrock blues he acknowledged stealing and his own fresh-made story songs that shared their simplicity as strength. 

He finger-picked six- and 12-string guitars and frailing banjo, and some harmonica, sometimes using a holder; and tapped beats on the stage. He soloed some, but mostly played like a songwriter; the notes carried the tunes. He radiated expression with an actor’s gestures, his face an instrument as much as his fingers or voice.

Songs paired or stood alone; the old earthy love-lust of “Shaky Pudding” setting up Dylan’s ethereal “Just Like a Woman” then a hearty singalong in “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” and a fervent “Shelter From the Storm.” All showed off shades of love in the first set; all were “stolen,” but Davis easily claimed them all.

However, he closed in on intermission with the new-album originals “Long Gone Riley Brown” and “In the Evening Time,” getting a good singalong on the latter.

Step impresario Margie Rosenkranz intro’ed the second set noting Davis was launching the venerable coffeehouse’s 57th season. He did so with the same confident mix of new and old as in the first. A particularly effective example: His slow folkie secret-lover lament “Got Your Letter In My Pocket” led logically to the timeless “Statesboro Blues” – Taj Mahal style, not Allmans’. 

Davis, in fact, built the whole show on Taj-like confident authenticity of sound and soul, but also managed to update. While lampooning 45 with scatological joke-songs felt a bit petty, Davis took real risks by mourning victims on both sides of the Gaza war, seeing the tragedy through the grief of mothers on both sides. This deep, sad blues for right now reached confidently for the moral power Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan pioneered. Here Davis was both timeless and immediate.

The Eighth Step season continues at Proctors: The Tannahill Weavers Sept. 22; David Roth & Anne Hills Sept. 27; Kate Campbell with John Kirk Oct. 4; Gunning & Cormier Oct. 27; Whispering Bones Oct. 31; Cheryl Wheeler with Kenny White Nov. 1 and others to be announced. http://www.8thstep.org. 518-346-6204