WEST MILFORD A tall, craggy, ramblin’ man, Chris Smither took the stage at Music at the Mission in West Milford this past Saturday night, bringing nothing but his guitar, his feet, and the kind of voice that conjures images of too many cigarettes and too much coffee, all consumed in the waiting room of a bus station at 3 a.m. Oh yes, he also toted along some four decades’ worth of songs part classic blues, part folk rock, all of it pure American music. The intimate room at the West Milford Presbyterian Church was sold out, the knowing audience anticipating a performance by a storied musician who cuts no corners and leaves no prisoners. Chris Smither did not disappoint. His feet stomping on the stage like a metronome, Smither immediately revealed his talent as a triple-threat singer/guitarist/songwriter, picking deft, rhythmic patterns and laconic, textured melodies on his acoustic guitar, with his moonlit baritone caressing the lyrics of “Train Home,” the meditative title track of his most recent album. The New Orleans native would run through a score of his original compositions during the evening, wringing and choking his guitar’s neck to produce a tremolo effect on venerable Smither tunes like “No Love Today,” “Love You Like a Man,” and “Hold On.” He introduced the witty “Lola” as “a song of obsession, a diseased love song,” a description confirmed in the closing verse: “Either I gave up or she let me go/how I got away I’ll never know./My life should be better, and it’s not./I know you think that she was pretty bad/I wouldn’t know, she was all I had.” A crisp sound system allowed the aching delicacy of his playing as well as his sometimes-profound, sometimes-humorous lyrics to flood over the hushed crowd. He shifted gears occasionally, covering songs by Jesse Winchester, the late Dave Carter, and J.J. Cale, also lending unusual interpretation to Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” which he performed in 3/4 waltz time. Smither delighted his audience by previewing some new material from his forthcoming album, due this summer, including a pair of songs addressing the politics of the day. His wry wordplay bore the distinct patina of acid on “Origin of Species” not surprisingly, a sharp-tongued take on so-called “Intelligent Design” and “Diplomacy,” perhaps the most purely rockin’ tune of the night. The concert ended on a note of longing as he looked south to New Orleans with a quietly wrenching rendition of Cale’s plaintive “Magnolia.” How masterful is Chris Smither? Bruce Springsteen once said that he always wanted to be the next Bob Dylan. But in his acoustic folk albums like “Nebraska” and “Devils and Dust,” The Boss actually hews closer to another American original the one who received a standing ovation in West Milford last weekend.