People who have been following Richard Thompson faithfully for the past 20 or 30 years have seen their share of stories about what an underrated, overlooked dark horse he is, often with headlines like "The Greatest Guitar Player You've Never Heard Of."

We're even a little tired of reading it.

"Yeah, me too," Thompson says on an early Monday morning.

While he's no legend on the Billboard charts, the British-born singer-songwriter-guitarist is one of the most respected among his peers, and anyone who truly cares about folk, rock or folk-rock has surely sought him out by now -- if you haven't, stop reading and go right to YouTube -- which has been enough to support a lovely career as a theater-sized touring artist.

The tour that brings Thompson to the Carnegie Library Music Hall of Homestead is Loud & Rich, a co-headlining venture with Loudon Wainwright III that promises no shortage of wit and fiercely good songs. Both artists were born in the late '40s (Wainwright is 63, Thompson 60) and got their start in the late '60s, Wainwright as a solo artist, Thompson as a teenaged gunslinger in esteemed British folk-rock band Fairport Convention.

Wainwright had the dubious distinction of scoring a novelty hit with "Dead Skunk (in the Middle of Road)," a song that leaned a bit toward the humorous side of his work. Thompson has managed to go hitless, while accumulating volumes of stellar reviews through Fairport, his solo career as both balladeer and electric blazer, and his brilliant late '70s partnership with former wife Linda, not to mention his occasional avant-garde tangents.

In naming him the 19th Greatest Guitar Player of All Time (behind Kurt Cobain and Johnny Ramone ... seriously?), Rolling Stone wrote that by the time he left Fairport in 1971, Thompson "had created a seamless world music for acoustic and electric guitar drawn from Celtic minstrelsy, psychedelia, Cajun dance tunes and Arabic scales."

Thompson's prolific output is captured on last year's Shout! Factory boxed set "Walking on a Wire: Richard Thompson (1968-2009)," a sort of "greatest hits" over four discs. Over the past few years, he's also released "1,000 Years of Popular Music," an ambitious, tongue-in-cheek distillation that runs from 13th-century pop (?) to his menacing cover of Britney Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again." His last solo record was 2007's "Sweet Warrior," highlighted by the potent anti-war song "Dad's Gonna Kill Me," about a soldier stationed in Iraq.

The current tour will sneak-peek a few new songs. In an interview earlier this week, he talked about those, as well as a recent taping of Elvis Costello's "Spectacle," in which he shared the stage for an all-star jam with Levon Helm, Allen Toussaint and Nick Lowe, among others.

How did this tour with Loudon come about -- do you guys have a long connection?

We're friends going back to the '70s and we've done tours before in other countries. We toured Japan together, we toured Australia together, and we thought it would be nice to bring that to the U.S.

Do you think there's a good contrast of styles?

Well, I think so. There's a kind of overlap. We're both singer-songwriters, so I think audiences would be sympathetic to each other's performance. Loudon's probably more American, I'm more British. Loudon's funnier than me [laughs].

Do you mean in his songs or stage banter?

Oh, everything. People think of him as a humorous writer, but he's one of the best writers of serious songs that there is out there. Some of the most devastating, touching songs that he writes are as good as anybody's.

You don't have a new album for this tour, but you do have some new material, right?

Yeah, there's always new material. I'm writing stuff for the next record, which I probably won't get to record until February, so there will be a few of those songs creeping into the show.

I understand there's a song about "the worst tour you were ever on" ["Hopscotch Over America"].

That's a new song, yeah. It is exactly that. It's about a tour back in the '70s. One of those tours that was so bad it was kind of funny. It wasn't funny at the time, but looking back it was just ridiculous how many things could possibly go wrong. So hopefully it's an amusing song.

Was that a solo tour?

I can't mention names. I was working for a singer-songwriter, it was a tour of the States, a disaster from beginning to end.

There's also a song called "A Brother Slips Away." Can you tell me about that?

It's a kind of requiem for lost friends. I lost a lot of friends lately. As you get older, people start to disappear. I just wanted to put up a little memorial there.

You like to joke about never having had a hit, but there are songs you have to play, right?

Yeah, with not having hits, I suppose the career I have is more performance driven than record driven, and I think what that means is that the audience in the end is more loyal because they found you through a more honest medium than the radio or record company hype. There are songs in performance that have become popular or frequently requested. Probably "Vincent Black Lightning" is the most requested song, I find. And that certainly wasn't a hit.

It's practically a hit on stations like WYEP in Pittsburgh.

It's the most requested song on public radio, I think. Which is an interesting statistic. There are people out there listening, which is fantastic.

You're referred to as a triple threat, which is a rare thing -- a great singer, songwriter and guitarist. When you think of those people who do you think of?

People who do three things? How 'bout Mose Allison? A singer, pianist, songwriter. He's pretty good. Um, Hoagy Carmichael. Same thing. There are a few pianists who do that.

Was Mose Allison an inspiration for you?

Yeah, I used to listen to him as a teenager. I think he's absolutely great, wonderful, and I saw him a few years ago and he was fantastic.

Do you feel like guitar is something you're always trying to master?

Yeah, I think the guitar is a difficult instrument, actually. It's easy to play easily. Most people can pick up a guitar and play a few chords quickly. Playing guitar well, it is a tricky instrument, so I think it's something you have to keep working at. And there's always technical barriers to be broken, so really there should be no end to one's application on the guitar.

Have there been players the past 10, 15 years, that you've heard and been impressed with, like 'Wow, how are they getting that sound?'

No, not really. There's technically very gifted guitar players from Eddie Van Halen onward -- the Joe Satrianis and those kind of people, who are technically amazing players. But I'm not attracted to the kind of content they play. What amazes me is to go back to the 1950s or something, and listen to those old Nashville players like Hank Garland or Grady Martin. These old Nashville studio guys were just phenomenal players. Unbelievable. Doing things that modern guitar players are not capable of, but also being far more harmonically interesting. I think that's the thing I miss is the harmonic interest in the playing.

So, do you have an iPod?

No, I'm a lost person.

I was wondering if that's the kind of stuff you would have on there.

No, you can find it on YouTube, which in a sense, I find more interesting.

What did you have to do personally for "Walking on a Wire"?

Oh, not much. Basically, the record company compiles a list of songs, which I looked at and in some cases listened to. And I made a few suggestions. It's basically their compilation, but I edited a few things. I swapped out a few tracks. In some cases, I preferred live versions to studio versions. But that was only 5 or 10 percent of the record where I really wanted to change anything. It's the kind of thing where if I had to do it, I wouldn't be able to. I don't think I could have the focus to sit down to do that about my own music. It'd be too ... too boring to do, actually.

So you don't really like going back and having to evaluate your own work?

Not really, no. When a project like this comes up, that's when I go back and listen to old material. Usually I want to hear production values rather than performances. Because I think of myself more as a live performer, I think of records as these documents that you kind of grow beyond. You have a song you recorded in 1970. You might perform that song 1,000 times, 2,000 times. Eventually, the version you play on stage grows away from the recorded version. So when I go back and listen to things I haven't listened to in a long time, it can sound strange. You can think, 'Well, that's much too slow. I do it much faster now.' Or you can think, 'What was I thinking? It's in the wrong key.' The version you're performing now is, for you, fresher and more vital.

It never happens the other way around?

Yeah, occasionally. Occasionally you get something in the studio where you say 'I'm not sure how we did that. That was just miraculous.' And try as I might I can't get beyond that. But that's unusual.

Both you and Loudon have musical progeny. How is Teddy's career going and what kind of guidance do you give him?

Teddy's career is going very well actually. He's doing particularly well in Europe right now. He's currently opening for Elton John around Europe, which is fantastic. What advice do I give him? A bit of musical advice over the years, but not much. In terms of business, he's far more savvy than I am. From the word go, he was firing managers and asking tricky questions of record companies in a way that I certainly wasn't when I was 18 years old.

So, the recent Elvis Costello taping. Sounds like it was quite an affair.

It was quite fun. The particular evening I was on, I was on with Levon Helm and Allen Toussaint and Nick Lowe. We performed individually and at the end collectively. This was kind of a strange band that we assembled. But it was just fantastic to play with Allen, and to play 'The Weight' with Levon three feet behind you was pretty thrilling.

And Elvis Costello, had you played with him before?

I don't think we ever played on stage together. We used to play in the '80s together around Elvis' house. Not much since then. I think he's up there with the best. Extremely prolific, of course.

Did you recognize his talent when he first came around, about '77?

Oh, yeah. I thought his first album was amazing. At that time, everything new was perceived as punk, so the Pretenders were punk and Elvis was punk. And they weren't really. They were just slightly a rawer interpretation of popular music. Obviously he was very talented and he kind of rode in on the wave of punk. But it was always apparent to me that he was probably the most interesting person to come out of that time.

And during that time, did you feel like you had to adjust?

Well, actually. I felt a bit lost in the '70s, from '73 to about '77. I couldn't see a direction in popular music. I thought, 'It's all over. I'll get a job as a gardener or something.' I think when punk came along it was a real re-invigoration of the music scene and I could see what I had to do, musically speaking. It was a great thing. It was something that really did effect everybody.

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