Raised in New Orleans, Chris Smither got his start in the Cambridge, Mass., folk revival of the late ’60s and early ’70s, when he could count among his dedicated fans Bonnie Raitt, who turned Smither’s “I Feel the Same” and “Love You Like a Man” (gender-switched to “Love Me Like a Man”) into FM hits. Unfortunately, the music business desertion of roots music and a personal weakness for alchohol combined in the late ’70s to derail Smither’s musical career. But after a short hiatus, he reemerged in the mid-’80s and has succeeded nicely since then, recording half a dozen albums for small labels and touring constantly. Live As I’ll Ever Be, recorded live in locations that include Sweetwater in Mill Valley and The Palms in Davis (as well as The Barns of Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., and music clubs in the Cambridge area and in Ireland), is as fine a showcase of Smither’s singular charm and folk-based virtuosity as anything he’s recorded since his mid-’80s personal revival. Compiling the best songs from his previous four studio albums, Live As I’ll Ever Be has the added advantage of being intimately and lovingly miked, with separate audio tracks for audience, vocals, acoustic guitar and even Smither’s tapping foot. The result is extraordinary, bringing a technophile’s clarity to the complex and soft-spoken musician’s performance, vividly capturing the “gestalt” of rhythmic pulse, densely woven fingerpicking and sardonic literacy that have become Smither’s stock-in-trade. Three moments help frame Smither’s unique and understated magic: a brilliant recreation of a vegetable vendor crying out in the streets, recalled (in a song introduction) from his New Orleans childhood, and the album’s two covers, “Dust My Broom,” which Smither rightly attributes to the Robert Johnson songbook, and a gorgeously deliberate reading of Rolly Sally’s “Killin’ the Blues,” which closes the program. The stunning artistry of all three remind us just how accomplished and devotedly idiosyncratic Smither is, blessed with the ability to make almost anything he performs feel warmly resonant, like a rare single malt aged in old oak barrels.