CONWAY, Ark.—The South has a legacy of great, iconoclastic storytellers — artists with a kudzu-shaded vision that cuts straight to the core of the human soul. Arkansas native Jim Mize’s new breakthrough album, simply called Jim Mize, stakes his claim among them. As its nine songs reveal, Mize is a primal rock ’n’ roll visionary who colors his music with hues borrowed from blues and garage psychedelia, and writes with a stark brevity that punctuates every heartbeat of the characters who draw the attention of his pen: car parkers and bar tenders, boozehounds and love-drunk couples, the longing and the satisfied, the faithful and the lost. Songs like “Drunk Moon Falling,” culled from an overheard conversation at an Austin restaurant, and the gorgeously textured “Eminence, Kentucky” reflect the same dirt-road view of life limned with traces of the surreal that permeate the writings of such masterful Southern novelists as Larry Brown and Barry Hannah, both of whom hail from Oxford, Mississippi. Coincidentally that’s also the home of Mize’s label Big Legal Mess, a subsidiary of Fat Possum Records. Mize has spent most of his 57 years wandering among such characters. As an insurance adjuster traveling the South and West for more than 30 years, he’s seen people at their most resilient and at their most vulnerable.