When Hal Ketchum describes the night that changed his life, he uses a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the vivid imagery and everyman aesthetic that has made the upstate New York native one of the most celebrated songwriters in roots music over the past two decades.

The scene is Gruene, Texas, a tiny ghost/tourist town just outside New Braunfels that’s famous for its slow, rustic pace. “Conveniently located between Austin and San Antonio, and a little behind the times,” boasts Gruene’s Web site.

“I was moving in on a Saturday night. I’d bought a little house (and) fixed it up a little bit,” Ketchum, 56, said in a telephone interview last week from Nashville, Tenn. “I was moving my family in and I was just sitting out in the back in a lawn chair, and I heard Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel across the river, a very identifiable sound.

“So I got in the truck and rolled the windows down and just kinda followed the front end of the truck,” he said.

There’s that phrase. Ketchum just followed the front end of his truck.

No particular aim. No particular hurry.

No idea what was out there.

Just followed the truck.

The truck was good to him.

“I came up this hill and Gruene Hall just appeared … and it was jumpin’,” Ketchum recalled. “Probably had 1,000 people, lights in the beer garden, and Ray and the Wheel on stage. It was like, ‘Wow. What is this?’”

Back then, Ketchum didn’t know much, if anything, about Gruene Hall, the legendary dance hall touted as the oldest of its kind in Texas. The place was built in 1878, and since, it has helped launch the careers of folks like Lyle Lovett, George Strait and one Hal Ketchum, who’ll perform Saturday night in Sisters as part of the Starry Nights benefit concert series (see “If you go”).

In fact, Ketchum hadn’t moved so close to Gruene Hall, or even to Texas, to pursue music as a career. He was a talented woodworker making his living as Gruene’s carpenter, he said.

But Gruene Hall drew him in. As a youngster in New York, he was part of a family that valued singing and playing songs; by age 14, he was gigging at local taverns. But he moved to Texas in the early 1980s without the ambition to make music for a living.

Hanging out at the hall changed that, though.

“It was music school for me. There’s no other way to say it,” Ketchum said. “I started going up there on Sunday afternoons, and … there’d be a singer-songwriter and it’d be Lyle Lovett or Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt or Joe Ely or Butch Hancock or some continuum of three or four of those guys.

“It’s a real funky old Texas dance hall where people just love music,” he said. “It’s a great cultural gathering place.”

Before long, Ketchum befriended some of the musicians, including Lovett and Jimmy Dale Gilmore. It was about three years between Ketchum’s first visit to the hall and the first time he played there, and that came after some encouraging words from Lovett.

“I had a three-song tape, and we went and sat out in the truck. He listened and he said, ‘You can do this, man,’” Ketchum said. “That was kind of the starting point for me, really.”

Ketchum eventually moved to Nashville, where he cut a song called “Small Town Saturday Night,” a classic tune about being young, broke, bored and lookin’ to escape a place where you “gotta be bad just to have a good time.” It was a big hit, and it opened the door to a career now nine albums deep.

Ketchum’s newest release, ironically, may be his most primitive. It’s called “Father Time,” and it was recorded over two days, live in studio and straight to tape. In other words, no overdubs, no pitch adjustment, no hiding out in little rooms to record individual parts separately.

No, this was old-school style recording, with a bunch of musicians sitting around a microphone, playing a song. That was just how Ketchum wanted it.

“There were no rules. There were no rehearsals,” he said. “We just set up and started playing.”

The decision to go simple came from conversations with other musicians who miss the old way, Ketchum said.

“I was talking to some session players and they were lamenting the fact that they don’t even get to sit in the same room anymore,” he said. “These guys just fly their parts in. They Pro Tool it all. They can fly a bridge in. If they want to save something, they can cut and paste. These guys were talking about how it used to be where everybody just sat in the room together and played, so I thought, ‘Well, let’s take a swing at it, and if it doesn’t work then we’ll just start multi-tracking.’”

It worked. The group finished nine songs on the first day, a result that so pleased Ketchum he decided to try recording the very first song he ever wrote on the second day.

That one worked, too. In fact, “Father Time” is sequenced in the exact order the songs were played and recorded, and many of the final versions are first takes, a testament to the “phenomenal” band of “bluegrass guys” that was assembled, Ketchum said.

“These are guys that play every day on something or other, and this was just real magical,” he said. “There’s a certain human element and dynamic to it that I … appreciated. Once I knew it was gonna work it felt mighty good.”

Critics have heaped praise on the album. Rick Bell of “Country Standard Time” magazine called it “acoustic country at a premier level” that sounds like “Ketchum and his mates are picking away on your living room sofa.” And Thom Jurek of www.allmusic .com said the songs are “all top-notch,” noting the influence of not only folk and country music, but also blues, funk, soul, Western swing and even tango.

Even Ketchum seems unsure of how to describe it.

“I guess it’s an acoustic record,” he said. “I’m not so sure sometimes when I listen to it. It’s just got a lot of different sort of grooves on it.”

That’s no surprise. Ketchum’s been following a different groove for a long time, ever since he followed the front end of his truck to Gruene Hall and walked away from carpentry to make music.

It was there he learned that, when it comes right down to it, the groove is the thing.

“First thing I did was hire a really good shuffle drummer and a bass player and a guitar player to try to get people wound up a little, because I learned that it’s a real dance society,” he said. “Texans dance. They love to dance. So I learned that I could play my songs as long as the tempo was (such that) people would get up and … get their asses moving and their minds would follow.”

If you go

What: Hal Ketchum, with openers Laura Curtis, Austin Erlandson and John Morton with Matt Cartmill from the Sisters High Americana Project

When: 7 p.m. Saturday, doors open 6:30 p.m., lobby opens 5:30 p.m. featuring Sisters High Jazz Choir and silent auction

Where: Sisters High School, 1700 W. McKinney Butte Drive, Sisters

Cost: $35, available at Leavitt’s Western Wear (541-549-6451) in Sisters. Call for ticket availability.

Contact: 541-549-8521, ext. 4007