Water Records’s loving reissue of the late Fred Neil’s 1967 album “Fred Neil” reclaims the idiosyncratic voice of one most moody performers of the 1960s. Neil is a good example of how the continual excavation of the Greenwich Village’s folk scene is bringing artists to the fore again. These saturnine acoustic poets are being introduced to a new generation of fans – one beyond the bearded white men in their 60s.

Neil’s best-known song was sung by someone else, which is fitting for a singer-songwriter who shunned fame. It was singer Harry Nilsson who performed the upbeat take on Neil’s bittersweet “Everybody’s Talking” for the soundtrack of “Midnight Cowboy.” And that version went straight into the top 10.

The perky cover version is a shadow of the original, but that’s the norm for an artist whose gifts are doomed not to be fully appreciated at first. Royalties permitted Neil to live the quiet life he favored without having to gamble with the music business again, almost ensuring that the man behind the song remained a ghost.

“Fred Neil” – the artist’s first outing for Capitol and his third album – was recorded in 1966 in Los Angeles under the hands-off guidance of producer Nik Venet. Neil’s earlier efforts, including 1964’s “Tear Down the Walls,” recorded as a duo with Vince Martin and 1965’s “Bleecker and Macdougal,” captured mere glimpses of his blossoming talent. Venet created a casual setting for Neil and his musicians to work in, and they produced 10 classics of nascent electric folk rock.

The supple mastering for this reissue immediately clears the aural palate. On aging original LPs, the songs sound slightly brittle and muddied; here they are crisp, lithe, and spacious. They heighten Neil’s subtle touch with arrangement. The remastering also adds body to Neil’s already beefy voice. Possessing a rich, buttery baritone, Neil delivers lines with a gustatory relish. This charismatic voice carries the dreamlike “Faretheewell (Fred’s Tune),” a Neil variation on the traditional folk song “If I Had Wings.” “Faretheewell” pulses along on an intermittent two-note bass line and a gossamer wing of finger-picked guitar melodies in the background. Over this fading heartbeat, Neil’s vocal cords massage each and every line as if it were a lover he was seeing for the very last time, stretching and caressing every vowel nook and consonant cranny of the “fare thee well” chorus.

The leadoff track, “The Dolphin,” captures Neil at his most impressionistic.The melody is a collision of hovering electric guitar vibrato, a strolling bass line,and a pair of acoustic guitars.”The Dolphin” moves with an easygoing swell and ebb.This sets the tone for the entire album, as Neil uses the carefree dolphin as a foil for his own feelings of being an outsider.

It’s a theme that appears again in the darkly comic, bluesy “That’s the Bag I’m In.” It’s also in the woozy fatalism of “I’ve Got a Secret (Didn’t We Shake Sugaree)” (his variation on an Elizabeth Cotton tune), as well as the galloping downer “Badi-Da,” which opens with the blunt-knife couplet: “I get so tired hanging around this town / all this old city life can sure bring a fellow down.”The world-weary laziness of the rhyme is out-sighed by the next line, a string of, well, “badi-das.”

That is not to say that Neil was a misanthrope: He knew what he liked, and it wasn’t big city life. Neil’s version of “Everybody’s Talking” is a revelation for anyone familiar only with Nilsson’s cover.Slower and propelled by a chilled bossa-nova bass throb, the song becomes not a capricious musing but a sullen promise to go where the weather suits his clothes, one he duly kept.

Neil left music in 1971 and spent most of his remaining years in Florida supporting the nonprofit Dolphin Project, an organization he co-founded in 1970 to rescue the mammals from captivity. He passed away July 8, 2001. His Dolphin Project lives on.