Lately my thoughts have turned to “Struttin My Stuff.”

Not my own, but the 1976 album by Elvin Bishop, a National Merit Scholar (physics was his bag) born in California and raised in Oklahoma, who became fascinated with what might now be called roots music, specifically R& B and the blues, learned the guitar, and became a professional musician who is still on the road today entertaining crowds at the age of 64.

Bishop embarked on a solo career right about the time that Americans were told by Charlie Daniels that “The South’s Gonna Do It Again,” and the opportunistic Tennessean name-checked the happy go luck Okie: “Elvin Bishop’s sittin’ on a bale of hay/He ain’t good lookin’ but he sure can play.”

Bishop, a fine player and writer who adopted the winking redneck nom de plume of Pigboy Crabshaw, was largely unconcerned with critical approbation in the sense of Rolling Stone magazine, a fact evidenced by some of his most enjoyable and unpretentious songs of the period, including “Stealin’ Watermelons,” “Holler and Shout,” and “Slick Titty Boom.”

While these were lazing, fishing and beer slopping tunes of a particularly effective order, Bishop’s obvious affection for his first musical loves always peeked through even the most formulaic of his early seventies offerings, and his faith was amply rewarded with the release of “Fooled Around and Fell In Love,” the single from “Struttin My Stuff.”

“Fooled Around and Fell In Love,” a huge hit in the spring of 1976, was both a reaffirmation of Bishop’s most fundamental instincts and an abrupt departure from the prevailing Crabshaw norm, the latter owing primarily to the appearance of a genuine singer in the guitarist’s consort.

It may have taken only a few years for Mickey Thomas to become the voice that we all loved to hate during his tenure with various incarnations of Starship in the 1980’s, but in 1976 he was fresh and bright, and the gospel-trained Thomas’s expansive vocal talents brought Bishop a memorable Billboard #3 song and a two-year window of headlining status.

What I remember best about “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” was that it landed in my ears during springtime, acting as a much needed palliative for the maddening emotional outpourings of adolescence that beset me then -- each and every ache of unrequited yearning, tug of hormonal confusion and hammerlock of youthful angst. The song was wistful, yet hopeful. One might indeed survive the sheer confusion of the inexperience of “love,” or lust, or whatever ephemeral reactions of brain chemistry that were being deciphered that way at age 16. Art actually helped. You could write about it, sing about it, sketch it, and work with it.

Three decades later, it is with immense pleasure and relief that I contemplate the cessation of such painful and distracting rites of passage, and find great solace in an unprecedented time of contentment, but for whatever reason, the notion of music for springtime has remained with me, and the joyful and emblematic annual recurrence came at the end of March, after I purchased “Twelve Stops and Home,” the debut album by The Feeling.

This collection of songs by a group of impossibly young Englishmen cannot be connected in any remotely stylistic or meaningfully thematic sense with the Bicentennial release by Elvin Bishop that prompted this recollection, although a case might be made that The Feeling’s comprehensive mélange of pop influences conceivably includes certain groups active contemporaneously with Pigboy Crabshaw’s unexpected popular ascendancy.

Recall that none other than the Bay City Rollers had a radio hit in 1976.

That’s meant as an absolute recommendation, by the way. As one whose musical preferences remain firmly wedded to the intricate simplicities of well written songs, fat hooks and whistle-worthy melodies, The Feeling’s sonic palate is a heaping platter of Krispy Kremes, an assortment of Godivas and a half-dozen servings of crème brulee, with bountiful snippets of the history of British pop from the Beatles through Badfinger, past Supertramp into the Commonwealth (Split Enz, Neil and Tim Finn, Crowded House) and landing somewhere in the vicinity of Keane – another current favorite of mine that I’ve yet to hear pounding from the trunks of passing boom cars.

That’s another recommendation.

It is unlikely that The Feeling will perform “Fooled Around and Fell In Love” any time soon, although the profitably mainstream Rod Stewart has, but if they took a stab at trying to cover Bishop’s classic, a version alchemized through the wry lens of Squeeze would be appropriate. I’ll try to imagine that possibility today while working outside in the yard, or walking the city streets, or merely sitting by an open window.

After all, it’s spring.