The small amount of music Chris Bell left behind reveals the obvious Anglophilia of a young musician smitten with the Beatles. So a snippet of conversation that precedes one of his recordings is an almost startling reminder that he was a Southern kid from Memphis. Just before playing an extended version of his song "I Am the Cosmos," Bell says the word "ruined," with Memphian seasoning - Roo-EEEned.

Bell, even more than his lionized Big Star bandmate Alex Chilton, embodies the water cycle that music followed from the late 1950s into the 1970s. The R&B, blues and early rock 'n' roll of the American South of the '50s rained down as British pop in the '60s. As Big Star, Bell and Chilton created in the '70s a type of soulful music clearly informed by the Beatles, but fluent also in the music that preceded the British Invasion.

Chilton became the musical cult hero, a lauded critic's darling who charted an, at times, confounding and mercurial path through the '80s and '90s. Bell became an obscurity after he died in a car accident in 1978 at age 27.

At that point Bell's available body of work consisted of one Big Star album, "#1 Record," and one 45, "I Am the Cosmos," and even those recordings were difficult to come by.

Nearly 40 years after his death, though, Bell is finally having his moment. A collection of the music he made prior to Big Star with bands Rock City, Icewater and the Wallabys was released in July. A loaded reissue of the posthumously released solo album "I Am the Cosmos" comes out this week. And then in November, a dense 6-LP set, "The Complete Chris Bell," will be released, followed by the publication of Rich Tupica's biography "There Was A Light: The Cosmic History of Big Star Founder Chris Bell."

The sum of all this material should bring into focus a major, yet misunderstood, musical figure who had previously been obscured.

A brief summation of Big Star may be in order for those who haven't over the years been swept up by perhaps the quintessential American cult band:

Big Star released three albums of dark soulful rock 'n' roll between 1972 and 1978, none of which sold many copies. Bell contributed significantly only to the first album before quitting. While Chilton took over Big Star in Bell's absence, Bell's stake on the band shouldn't be minimized. Bell turned in "#1 Record" as a class project at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). At no point during his tenure in Big Star did he view himself as a peripheral character. It was his band.

But by pulling the ripcord, Bell essentially wrote himself out of the band's history, which did his legacy no favors. One esteemed music critic referred to him as Chilton's "folkie counterpart," even though Bell is the guy doing the glam rock braying on "Feel" and "On the Street."

Little has been written about Bell over the years. A scarcity of music led to a scarcity of interest. His brother David offered some insight, portraying a sensitive young man who would flit between crippling depression and bright-eyed enthusiasm for music. David tried to drag Bell out of a serious drug-and-depression funk by setting up a recording session in France in the mid-'70s. That music wouldn't see release until 1992, when "I Am the Cosmos" was first released. The record was a revelation.

"I Am the Cosmos" should have set the Big Star story straight - that Bell was no folkie, but rather a soulful driving spirit of that influential band. Admittedly, he spent some of his last years playing folk clubs around Europe, but the Bell heard on "Cosmos" is a musician with immodest aspirations.

For all the ambition, Bell also worked skillfully in presenting personal, minute details. I can't track down a review I read that suggested the song "I Am the Cosmos" was about egomaniacal aspiration. That's a gross misreading of the song, which instead reveals a shaken soul trying to give himself a pep talk and failing.

"Every night I tell myself 'I am the cosmos, I am the wind,' " Bell sings in a high, bruised voice. "But that don't get you back again. Just when I was starting to feel OK, you're on the phone. I never want to be alone."

Bell wrote with emotional transparency. He built brittle skyscrapers like "Speed of Sound," where a little understated folk ballad was expanded into something more dense and intriguing with a slide guitar and marimba.

The 2012 documentary "Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me" offered a little more background on Bell, but the film still was largely trained on Chilton, who also was the subject of a very well researched and written 2014 biography by Holly George-Warren. Chilton lived long enough to enjoy some windfall from Big Star's delayed discovery and reverence. Even then, though, the attention didn't dramatically change his fortunes. Chilton died in 2010 at age 59 of a heart attack, one that came with warning signs that were ignored because he had no health insurance. Cult renown doesn't pay the bills.

Chilton nevertheless never retired, and left behind a defiantly diverse collection of music.

Bell, by contrast, is permanently young. And he left us with little, so the scraps that have come this year - alternate mixes and outtakes - are received ravenously by a few. This rush of material, old-old songs and new-old songs, should, with more biographical information, help put some attention on Bell's music, which has for too long been immersed in misunderstanding and mystique.