The voice is shaky, thick with pain and weary of the world. “My mind is ramblin’ place to place / Tell me, tell me what I must do,” it moans. A slow, loose rhythm lurches beneath and a distorted guitar plays a mournful melody. “Hey girl / Say you love me, say that you’ll be mine.” Then a bone-rattling howl launches towards the heavens.

A lifetime of hard living must have gone into that howl; its owner surely spent decades tramping down dirt roads with no shoes on, no money in his pocket, and nowhere to rest his head at night. Right?

It turns out the man singing “My Mind Is Ramblin” is Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, a 25-year-old white guy who grew up listening to Devo and the Wu-Tang Clan in Akron, Ohio. The man who wrote the song, David “Junior” Kimbrough, was an African-American who grew up working the fields in the Mississippi Delta. He ran a juke joint out of his house, allegedly fathered 36 children, and didn’t record his first album until he was 62.

If the unwritten rules of blues credibility still apply, the Black Keys’s take on “My Mind Is Ramblin'” ought to pale in comparison to Kimbrough’s original. But listen to the version that appears on Kimbrough’s 1993 album “Sad Days, Lonely Nights”: It’s faster and lighter. Kimbrough is just as needy as Auerbach, but less tortured; he sounds like a horny drunk begging for some late night lovin’. I hesitate to say Auerbach’s is categorically better; they’re just entirely different interpretations.

Besides exposing new listeners to the down-and-dirty magic of the late Kimbrough (he died of heart failure in 1998 at the age of 67), the mission of “Sunday Nights” (Fat Possum) seems to be to prove that members of the indie-rock generation are just as capable of mining the blues for inspiration as their parents.

Like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton before them, the Black Keys, Heartless Bastards, and other young artists on this album treat the music as the essence of authenticity. What better way to show how committed you are to the preservation of “real” music in the face of “fake” corporate pop than by covering Junior Kimbrough? The irony is that, at this moment in time, the mainstream is dominated by hip-hop, a genre that essentially is modern-day blues. That certainly can’t be said for indie rock.

Alas, there is no hip-hop on “Sunday Nights.” And, as with most tribute albums, its tracks are a mixed bag. Pete Yorn, Thee Shams, Outrageous Cherry, and Whitey Kirst take no risks, delivering predictably lo-fi, feedback drenched performances that fit the dictionary definition of what young, hip Caucasians playing blues covers in the mid-00s are supposed to sound like. The Fiery Furnaces’s “I’m Leaving” avoids that trap with a rubbery bass line, barroom piano tinkling, and Eleanor Friedberger’s sassy singing.

On “Meet Me in the City,” Blues Explosion, which has been doing this kind of thing for a decade and a half, offers yet another indication that it’s time for them to throw in the towel. Front man Jon Spencer’s trademark Elvis-impersonator drawl just isn’t funny anymore. Spiritualized, Blues Explosion’s rough contemporaries, fare better: “Sad Days Lonely Nights” is a ramshackle construction of wheezing, droning, and thumping that somehow transforms into a spaceship and flies away.

Besides the Black Keys, the artist who most closely captures Kimbrough’s haunting desperation is Mark Lanegan, a veteran of the Seattle grunge scene who once fronted the Screaming Trees. Over high-lonesome slide guitar and a tambourine rattling like chains, Lanegan’s bottom-of-the-barrel baritone is both sexy and menacing, as he growls lines like “Girl, the way you love make me speak in tongues” on “All Night Long.”

Junior Kimbrough wasn’t all about sadness and strife. He liked to party – the titular Sunday nights at Junior’s juke joint were legendary for their debauchery. Only one act on the tribute album stirs up the kind of energy that might have permeated the air at those affairs, and it’s the oldest one there: Iggy and the Stooges.

Reunited in 2003 after a 30-year breakup, the pioneering proto-punk band contributed its first new recordings to “Sunday Nights.” The two versions of “You Better Run” that bookend the compilation are nearly identical rushes of pure rock-and-roll adrenaline. The guitars squeal, the rhythm gallops. Iggy Pop sneers, grunts, and talk-sings through a series of ad-libs, making light of the song’s very dark subject matter: rape.

Yes, it’s tasteless. But when everyone else around is a boy acting like an old man, it’s exhilarating to hear an old man acting like a boy.