Of all the Fat Possum label’s idiosyncratic blues artists — men who drink moonshine, howl as they cuff raggedy chords from beaten guitars, and are convinced that the label is cheating them in some way, albeit less than other white people have in the past — Arkansas’s CeDell Davis is the most unusual. He was afflicted with severe polio at age nine and shortly thereafter got stomped savagely by fleeing patrons in a juke-joint raid and was left in a wheelchair for life. His hands are so gnarled that he was forced to develop his own guitar style, fretting with a butter knife in his right hand and picking with the clawed fingers of his left. His tuning is best described as “off.” So though his playing hops to the cadence of hardcore 12-bar or one-chord blues, his tonality is utterly demented. It’s as though the sound left his instrument and got twisted in all sorts of dissonant and oddly harmonic directions by the space-time continuum before hitting your ears. Over this arresting caterwaul, which has been perfected as much as it could be during more than 50 years of playing rural juke joints, Davis unleashes a bawling voice so deep and resonant it threatens to shred microphones like tissue paper. He is truly a force of nature — a sonic Delta tornado.

He blew into the Boston area a week ago Thursday, for the first time in more than 20 years, with fellow Fat Possum artists Paul “Wine” Jones and T-Model Ford, two other practitioners of unvarnished backwoods music, to play Harvard Square’s House of Blues. High on gin and stoked on the crowd, Jones put down the heavy stomp, ripping chords and sliding leads out of a guitar capo’d at F# — his current favorite key — and hollering lyrics about his baby catching him with another woman and putting a mad dog on his trail. Ford, who would turn 80 four days later, laid down the charm as the headliner. He and his drummer, Spam, who backed everybody that night in the drums-and-guitar-band set-ups, put plenty of rusty swing in their bouncing music, playing a personalized distillation of Howlin’ Wolf right down to Ford’s “aw-ooo-ooo” exclamations. Ford’s music goes down so easy, he might be the reigning Dr. Feelgood of authentic rural electric blues if it weren’t for R.L. Burnside.

Although Davis opened the show, he was the main event. It was a gas watching him confuse the boneheads left over from an earlier corporate party still wearing their plastic Blues Brother fedoras and glasses. (Let’s stop distilling more than 250 years of African-American culture into brainless shtick, shall we?) From under his baseball cap came that voice, blaring through the club as he sang stories about his own life and hard times living along the banks of the Mississippi and dipped back for classics he heard growing up as a boy, like “That’s All Right” and “Big Boss Man” (which seemed fresh and foreign thanks to his bizarre sonics), or B.B. King’s smooth “Three O’Clock Blues” redone as a martial stomp. Most poignant, though, was his final number, John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” done without the boogie — more an ink blot of sound with lyrics than that familiar tune. Poignant, because Hooker had died in the wee hours that morning. Perhaps Davis’s performance was a kind of cosmic notice that none of us will ever be able to take Hooker or his music for granted again.