And so you can imagine, I didn’t have to give a second or third thought to the idea of changing my name, because my dad had been doing it in the ’60s. It just seemed second nature. The songs are malleable, the identities are malleable and in some cases, the music is malleable. What’s ‘‘Act Naturally?’’ It’s a Buck Owens song, but to most people in England, it’s Ringo’s novelty song on ‘‘Help.’’

Your dad, who died in 2011, had quite a musical career. He played ‘‘If I Had a Hammer’’ at the famous Royal Variety Performance in 1963 at which John Lennon told the aristocrats in the audience to ‘‘rattle your jewelry.’’ It's one of those odd things about that time: the coincidence of my dad being on a show with Paul McCartney and Bacharach. In England, because we had so little television and radio, there was only a few hours of recorded music a day, so that live musicians could work. They were either BBC orchestras or orchestras contracted by the BBC. They would have somebody playing light classics and then a dance band and then somebody playing the cinema organ and then a record-­request show for half an hour. It made hearing your favorite record really stick out, but it also offered the opportunity to hear these bizarre renditions of the famous songs of the day. The band that my dad sang with was like a Glenn Miller-style band. But they were playing ‘‘Substitute’’ and ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone’’ ’cause that’s what was in the charts and that’s what my dad had to sing.

The structure of your book is unusual. Biography has never been my favorite genre, but I was captivated by how you find themes and pick them up, without worrying too much about the chronology. Why did you decide to write it? The book coincided with realizing that my father was not well. He had had good health his whole life, and then, just before he was 80, he got Parkinson’s. He’d been so full of stories his whole life, and certain things about my grandfather, I got totally from him. I realized I had a responsibility that was heightened by becoming a father again — putting the things that I’ve done in the context of how I was conditioned to listen to music from childhood. And then looking for just little events, private ones and some of the very public things like Live Aid. So there’s a lot of accounts of my apprenticeship in Liverpool and in London in the early ’70s.

What were your influences then? What were you trying to do? I was playing in public when I moved to Liverpool in 1970. In London, you would have traditional singers and contemporary singers in the same clubs. In Liverpool, you didn’t. The traditional clubs were very seriously about traditional music and Irish music. And if you tried to sing your own song, you were out; they didn’t want to know.

I quickly learned that there were only certain places I could play. I wasn’t like Richard Thompson — I never had this rich language of English or even Irish traditional music. I just had the knowledge of the few records my dad had, you know, a Clancy Brothers record and a Chieftains record. And I knew some songs. I knew some ‘‘rebel songs.’’ I just learned them all by osmosis. Later on I got really, really fascinated by Appalachian music. Of course, they are all the same songs, but somehow I heard them more clearly — Doc Watson and these people. From the ’70s through the mid-’80s, I absorbed all the American music, not just country music like Nashville country music or Bakersfield country music, but older, more traditional styles, even the Stanley Brothers and that stuff. Of course, they were all the same roots. Often you trace them back and they actually are Irish or Scottish songs.

Was country and western a big deal in England? I know that R & B was. R & B was much more. I think I’m right in saying there is an older generation of musicians and music fans who will be perfectly familiar with the Johnny Cash records. I’m not old enough to have more than registered ‘‘Ring of Fire.’’ I had heard ‘‘I Walk the Line,’’ but I hadn’t heard it in the context of all the other songs he did. So it was like, ‘‘Oh, he’s that guy with that unusual voice.’’ And then I was given ‘‘Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin’’ for Christmas. That’s a good Christmas present, a live record from prison.

And then I started to piece together what he was. We didn’t hear a lot of American roots music. Skiffle was a very big thing in England with Lonnie Donegan in the early ’60s. They were playing Lead Belly songs and Woody Guthrie, but they tended to be on the comic end.