The guitarist Jack Rose, who has died of a heart attack aged 38, was a towering figure within the folk revival of the last decade. Not that Rose would have appreciated that term: his interest was always more in blues, noise and near-eastern music, just as his performances were visceral affairs, matching technique and emotion with a rollicking swing. In this, he was following in the footsteps of 1960s American guitarists such as John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Peter Walker – all of whom have had a revival of interest during the past few years. Like those intrepid explorers, Rose sourced pre-second world war modes at the same time as he freely crossed musical boundaries, mixing drones with finger-picking, ragtime with ragas, stately two-steps with Bashovian torrents of sound.

In a recent online interview with Arthur magazine, Rose observed that the guitar "is limited and limitless at the same time. On a fretted guitar you've got 12 notes to work with and it is such a small range. But when you're tuning a six-string, you can use a lot of different tunings and combinations. With the ability to put the guitar into so many different types of tuning, you are offered so many different possibilities."

Rose's excitement at these possibilities resulted in an almost never-ending succession of live shows and a flow of releases on a variety of labels – most notably Opium Musick (2003), Kensington Blues (2005) and Dr Ragtime and his Pals (2008). The fertility of these records was only matched by their quality: they were an expression of his lust for life, which makes his death all the more shocking.

Rose was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Although there was no musical tradition in his family, he began playing while in high school. Exposed to classic blues and the art of finger-picking in his early teens, he formed a band called the Mice before moving to Richmond to study English at Virginia Commonwealth University. During the mid-1990s, Rose joined Pelt. In reaction to the period's produced "alternative" music, this Richmond group specialised in post-rock drones, on records such as Brown Cyclopedia (1995) and Pearls From the River (2003). They also "had a sideline in playing acoustic music for themselves," remembers Bill Kellum, who released Pelt and Rose on his label VHF Records: "Being from Virginia, it's pretty much ingrained in the culture."

The turning point for Rose came when he heard Fahey and Basho in the late 1990s, he said: "With the drone background that I already had, all of that came together and made sense. And I was listening to [composer] Terry Riley, and I just made all these connections between different types of music." Realising that his technique did not match up to his ambitions, Rose did "some really intensive wood-shedding", says Kellum: "He got dramatically better in the course of a year. This would have been around 2001 or so." The following year, he released his first proper solo record, Red Horse, White Mule, followed in 2003 by Opium Musick.

It was on Kensington Blues that the Fahey influence came to the fore: "I noticed that on a song like the Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick, Fahey was accentuating the downbeat," Rose observed. "I realised that's where the jug is in jug-band music, that's where the rhythm is. So then I started playing on the downbeat – John Fahey, ragtime, the blues – all came into place."

On recent records such as Dr Ragtime and his Pals, Rose began to mine that lost musical arcadia first mapped by Fahey, that period, in the 1900s, just before mass recording, when the oral tradition and localised, live performance still held sway. This was the moment when the great currents of 20th-century American culture began to flow together: Rose gave them new life and renewed vigour almost exactly a century later.

The records were enhanced by the impact of Rose's many live performances. "Jack was hugely inspirational," recalls Rick Tomlinson (aka Voice of the Seven Woods), one of the new breed of British guitar-players to follow his example. "I've never been so transfixed by a solo guitar show as I was when Jack was playing."

Rose left one final album, Luck in the Valley, to be released in February. He was interviewed by Arthur magazine during the recording: "I always think the last record I make is going to be the last one, but there is always something that comes along that piques my interest. Like the one I'm working on right now, I got back from the second session, and I was like, 'Wow, shit I've got a lot of work to do.'"

He is survived by his wife, Laurie.

• Jack Rose, guitarist, born 16 February 1971; died 5 December 2009