John Mellencamp

Launched reluctantly into the rock business as Johnny Cougar in 1976, John Mellencamp took less than a decade to establish himself as one of the finest singer-songwriters in rock ’n’ roll. He truly arrived in 1982 with the album American Fool, featuring the gritty ballad “Jack & Diane” — with its memorably cutting line, “Life goes on, after the thrill of living is gone” — and the sinewy rocker “Hurts So Good.” Three years later turned out another classic American rock single, “R.O.C.K. In the U.S.A. (A Salute to ’60s Rock),” and he continued his acquaintance with the Top 10 in the mid-’90s with a cover Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” (1994), duetting with Me'Shell Ndegeocello. Mellencamp supplements his rock with rootsy warmth, in Next Steps.

John Mellencamp added American folk touches to The Lonesome Jubilee (1987) by expanding his sound to include Lisa Germano’s fiddle and accordion, notably on “Hot Dogs and Hamburgers,” while the lyrical, grassroots side of his work stands out on “Rooty Toot Toot,” a signature slice-of-life about everyday folks getting by in tough times. Two decades down the road, Mellencamp retained that fundamental earthy feel, and gave it a widescreen dimension, with 2007’s superb Freedom’s Road, featuring “Someday,” a brilliantly executed meditation on the darker side of the human condition . . . a theme he continued to explore with the following year’s “Troubled Land.” Explore the intricacies of Mellencamp’s masterpiece, in Deep Cuts.

Scarecrow, from 1985, is John Mellencamp’s heartland masterwork, a bold and solid attempt to explore the hopes and fears of Middle America that is every bit as passionate and authentic as the contemporaneous output of Bruce Springsteen. That same year, he backed the Farm Aid charity event, along with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and went a long way towards capturing the essence of rural life on “Between a Laugh and a Tear.” Here we’ve also included a salute to folk legend Woody Guthrie — “Do Re Mi” — alongside “Taxi Dancer,” a muted highlight from his second album, A Biography, as well as his Cajun-flavored addition to the Christmas canon, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

John Mellencamp has been an inspirational fighter all his life, first to beat his crippling childhood illness (spina bifida), then to reclaim his name from record company marketing departments, and onwards through his principled stands on rural poverty and the exploitative forces of corporate rock-sponsorship (for a long time, he refused to sell his music for commercial use, but relented in 2006 by attaching “Our Country” to a Chevrolet truck campaign). Outside of music, Mellencamp is an actor/director and a painter, but his excellence is nowhere more apparent than in his consistently brilliant, gutsy rock catalog, which takes in everything from 1996’s Mr. Happy Go Lucky, on which he flecked his rootsy core sound with clever embellishments by producer Junior Vasquez, to the morbid brilliance of 2008’s Life, Death, Love and Freedom, in which the artist’s finely drawn reflections on mortality seem even more poignant given that he survived a serious heart attack back in ’94. Rock on.