There is a new wave of young American “alternative country” bands daring to re-evaluate their national music heritage. Nashville pedal steel guitars now sit easily in the kind of independently minded acts that would once have considered them heresy. They draw in fans old enough to remember country rock’s first wave of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers in the 1960s, and college kids for whom the music’s homespun leanings chime with a diginity absent from stadium grunge rock.

It was 30-year-old Missouri musician Jay Farrar’s first group, Uncle Tupelo, that kick-started this trend. The magazine No Depression, alt country’s inky bimonthly bible, takes its name from Uncle Tupelo’s 1990 debut album. Now every American label is cultivating at least one alt country act beside its Identikit female folk-rock sirens and third-generation Nirvana copies.

Wagon, Whiskeytown, Mr Henry, Richmond Fontaine, the Gourds and the Backsliders are among the Flying Burrito Brothers-inflected postpunks coming to a decent record shop near you soon; and Farrar’s new band, Son Volt, start their first UK tour on Wednesday. So how does it feel to be a figurehead, Jay Farrar? “Some people might try to put us in that position,” he says, “but I don’t see it.”

To describe Farrar as an unforthcoming man would be an understatement. There are more communicative monks. But his abstracted earnestness at least reflects his music, rather than seeming like the usual rock’n’roll dimwit’s affectation of depth. When Uncle Tupelo split after 1993’s Anodyne LP, sour-faced Farrar formed Son Volt; his Teletubby-lookalike partner Jeff Tweedy rechristened the remainder of the band Wilco, and went in search of sunnier musical climes. While Son Volt have spent two albums refining the Tupelo template of dark, insurgent, subtly melodic electro-acoustic country without troubling the music press too much, Wilco’s sophomore effort, the Being There double album – a sprawling, professionally executed pastiche of three decades of classic Americana – is many a thirtysomething rock critic’s record of 1997.

Wilco closed their world tour at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in April, ungraciously baiting the limeys while a roadie sang Black Sabbath songs to bewildered Mojo readers, and were last seen parachuting out of a plane in the video for the Outtasite single. Tweedy has even been quoted in No Depression as saying Uncle Tupelo’s “sombre” approach was “bulls***. Music is entertainment,” he affirmed.

But Farrar, a genuine southern gentleman to the last, won’t be drawn on his old bandmate’s newly discovered sense of rock theatre. “I just concentrate on the task in hand,” he offers. Indeed, if you choose to buy into Farrar’s shrug-shouldered, noncommital stance, his whole
musical career seems to have been sustained unplanned, via a string of accidents.

Introducing songs by the Depression-era vocal troupe the Carter Family and 1950s gospel-bluegrass group the Louvin Brothers into Uncle Tupelo’s early 1980s US-college rock-derived catalogue seemed like the actions of a wilful maverick bent on fusing new musical
alliances, but Farrar pleads innocence. “They were just the songs I heard when I was growing up on old folk compilations that belonged to my parents,” he explains. And was covering Rolling Stone Ron Wood’s Mystifies Me at the close of Son Volt’s 1995 debut, Trace, a
respectful nod to country-rock godfathers the Flying Burrito Brothers, who did likewise to Jagger and Richards’s not dissimilar Wild Horses at the end of 1969’s Burrito Deluxe? “No, it was just something we were listening to at the time,” Farrar offers.

Farrar, then, the country-rock resurgence’s accidental messiah, more Graham Chapman’s Brian than Robert Powell’s Jesus, is cursed with humility and unable to second-guess what is expected from him. Indeed, when Uncle Tupelo first played in Britain, off the back of their down-home, acoustic, bluegrass-influenced 1992 album, the simply titled March 16-20 1992, they disappointed fans with an unrepresentative set of their most obvious electric power-thrash
numbers. Farrar says: “It was difficult to work out what kind of amplification to use for acoustic instruments” But Tweedy has gone on record claiming that Farrar insisted, for some reason known only tohimself, on ignoring the acoustic numbers in favour of short, sharp
shocks.

Whatever the truth of the story, Farrar says that, live, Son Volt accurately sum up the band’s breadth of different sounds. Next week’s shows should embrace the four-piece’s delicate balancing act of direct, irresistible, melodic country rock and fiddle-enhanced tear-jerkers, all capped by Farrar’s heaven-sent gift of a voice, an impossibly authoritative, whisky-soaked burr utterly unlike any other. And though he has trouble explaining himself in person, Farrar
is increasingly adept at finding exactly the right words for his music.

Trace opened with Windfall, something of a stylistic declaration of intent, picturing a lonesome driver “Switching it over to AM, searching for a truer sound/Can’t recall the call letters, steel
guitar and settle down/Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana/Sounds like 1963 but for now it sounds like heaven.” The new album, Straightways, mixes geographical metaphors and images of confusion and loss with empathetic aplomb. Fans do not write to
Farrar with personal problems but, he concedes, they might suggest a good route across country.

Like the aimless drifters he writes of, surrendering to the mercy of circumstance and the elements, Farrar seems to see Son Volt’s success as something beyond his influence. Was he happy with Trace? “It did well enough for us to continue touring,” he reflects, as if optimism
is a luxury his puritanical streak can’t accommodate, “and to be allowed to make Straightways. Now it remains to be seen what happens next.” So, will he be parachuting out of a plane in a big-bucks promotional video in the near future? For the first time, there’s the sense of a smile as he answers: “Let’s just say that the opportunity has not yet presented itself.”