Since the 1987 release of I Know(Red House Records) Gorka has come to be seen as a “musician’s musician,” the sort who has other songwriters scratching their heads thinking “I wish I’d written that,” even while scrambling to record their own versions of his songs. The New Jersey native (more readily associated with Minnesota where he has lived most of his adult life) is also an exemplary guitarist, with a finger picked style that hearkens back to Bukka White, but is uniquely his.

As a child, Gorka had been given a guitar as a Christmas present but, by his own admission, “never really thought much about playing music in front of people.” He eventually began doing so while attending college in Pennsylvania in the early ‘80s (a time when folk music was experiencing another of its cyclical revivals).

Gorka eventually formed his own band, nonsensically dubbed “The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band,” and began performing up and down the Eastern Seaboard, “playing for tips, sleeping on couches, and living a vagabond life of poverty.”

His big break occurred in 1984 when Gorka, who’d made his way to Texas hoping to join the burgeoning Austin music scene, won the prestigious Kerrville Folk FestivalNew Folk Award. That led to a series of other high profile festival gigs and a recording deal.

After the release of I Know, Gorka briefly moved to Windham Hill Records, for whom he cut the highly acclaimed Land of The Bottom Line, but soon settled with the High Street Label, making five critically and commercially successful albums. The most significant of those efforts, 1993’s Temporary Road, garnered significant airplay from country outlets with crossover success of the single and video “When She Kisses Me.”

That exposure resulted in tours supporting Mary Chapin Carpenter and Nanci Griffith, along with studio work with guitarist Leo Kottke and Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks. Between Five and Sevenfollowed in 1996, and two years later Gorka returned with After Yesterday, which marked his return to the Red House label. In 2010 he teamed up with Eliza Gilkyson and Lucy Kaplansky for both a tour and the album Red Horse. For the next four years Gorka continued to tour steadily but didn’t release another album until 2014’s The Bright Side of Down.

But it is his latest project that understandably excites him: Beginning: The Unreleased I Know– Nashville, 1985 Sessionsare outtakes from Gorka’s very first sessions, recorded at Cowboy Jack Clements’ studio under the guidance of producer Jim Rooney, who at that time was riding high for his work with Nanci Griffith. These nascent recordings, made with the full intent of release before Gorka and Rooney decided to take the sessions in a direction that eventually yielded the debut album, will be available this July (digitally and physical product) through Red House. It features nine of the 12 songs that would be on I Know, as well as “Geza’s Wailing Ways,” a track only released on a rare 1983 Fast Folkcompilation.

Recorded and mixed over a frenetic period of five days, by Gorka and a full band these sessions promise to provide a fascinating look into the road not taken, an alternate musical direction the artist and producer chose to forego.

Featuring extensive liner notes and reminiscences by Gorka the artist revisits his first foray, as an aspirating wide eyed 25-year-old, into a professional studio.

“Even though it is an older recording it is a fresh take on the songs” he says. “For the most part these songs were my introduction to the world. I can only say that I was finding my way. I had played solo live almost exclusively and I had not made an album or ever done a studio recording with other players. I guess I just didn’t know what I wanted to hear but I know now that there is more than one right way to present a song. These songs weren’t cast offs, or songs that weren’t good enough. They just weren’t what I wanted at the time.”

It would be two more years and two more versions, both recorded in his home state of New Jersey, before I Knowwould see the light of day. Over the years, the multi-track tapes of the original recordings followed Gorka around as the relocated. He eventually set them aside but in the fall of 2014, he took them out of storage to see if they would still play.

“I brought them to Rob Genadek at The Brewhouse Recording Studio in Minneapolis to listen and we enjoyed what we heard. I thought that others might too, even those people who were familiar with the songs. It had different arrangements and a different energy as I was singing and playing live with the band. Kenny Malone on drums and percussion, Dave Pomeroy on bass and some backing vocals, I think. Jay Patten on saxophone. Mike Dugan on electric guitar. Ralph Vitello or Biff Watson on keyboards. And Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin. Jim Rooney also played second acoustic guitar on several songs and Shawn Colvin and Lucy Kaplansky sang while we did the tracking, everyone in one room. Rob actually thought to bake the tapes with a hair dryer so that magnetic particles would not flake off. I’m s o glad he did, as that allowed us to transfer the analog tapes to the digital world and here they are.”

Indeed. And come Friday June 3 so too will John Gorka, playing these “new” old familiars along with others from this thirty year career. Times have changed; the industry certainly has, but the affability and dependability that marks the music and career of the artist remains the same.

John Gorka at the Isis Restaurant and Music Hall on Friday, June 3. Tickets are priced at $20 Advance / $20 Door for this 7:30 show, with doors opening at 5. Please note that this is a seated show with a limited number of tables available with dinner reservations. Call (828) 575-2737 for reservations