It's time to put your Beach Boys records back in their box, time to delete the "Hanging Poolside" mix off of your iPod. Autumn is here. The days are growing shorter, colder. And the night's frigid darkness is looming earlier by the day over our newly snow-crusted mountains.

These are days for hardscrabble sounds - worn-out cowboy boots tapping on dusty wooden floors, acoustic guitars, beaten human voices uncut by mixers and the audio Botox of computers.

Steve's Guitars in Carbondale is offering us a seasonally-fitting double bill this week, with two unheralded American masters of raw folk poetry - Dirk Hamilton (Sat, Sept. 26, 8:30 p.m.) and Diana Jones (Sunday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m.).

Hamilton, who plays Steve's Saturday night, has been recording for the better part of four decades. The Dallas-based singer-songwriter is coming through Carbondale on a mountain-town swing that also includes Salida and Buena Vista, on what might be called his Beatiful Places Tour (after Colorado he is hitting idyllic towns in California like Woodland and Winters).

Hamilton sings with a malleable voice that, at turns, can sound like the soft and colloquial lilt of Randy Newman, or a gravelly road-beaten growl a la Townes Van Zandt, or, when he gets lively, exploding in an irresistible wail like Van Morrison - sometimes at a poppy sing-along jaunt like John Mellancamp.

But he writes the kind of lyrics that will silence the rowdiest of barrooms - he pens visions of Van Gogh and rainbows amid dirty roadhouse rabble-rousers, he entwines high poetry with base reality: "Time is like a pearl / Spend it like you would your time inside a girl."

Hamilton made a splash with his 1978 album "Meet Me at the Crux," which drew comparisons with genius Warren Zevon and later led to a touring gig with Zevon himself. But it has yet to give him wide airplay or stardom...

...The vision of a lonesome troubadour sticking out a thumb on a cold and windy autumn highway with guitar case slung over his or her back long ago fell into our ever-growing collection of American clichés, sure. But Dirk Hamilton and Diana Jones are the real thing - living proof that the folky road musician lives on, scarred by cliché or not, and ready to destroy you with some honest words and a pluck of guitar.