Like the blues, the heart has its own heritage.

Eric Clapton's From the Cradle is the legendary performer's long-awaited homage to the music whose "instant physical feeling of excitement and fear was my original impulse to be a musician."

Indeed, since Eric Patrick Clapton first forged his recording reputation in the sixties with the Yardbirds and John Mayall's Blues Breakers, he vowed to one day create the pure blues testament his rapt affection for the form had always betokened. But if this sixteen-track live studio session of songs by blues greats like Leroy Carr, Eddie Boyd, Lowell Fulson, Willie Dixon, Freddy King, Elmore James and Muddy Waters was simply a seasoned gesture of artistic reverence, it would not deserve its undeniable status as the British guitar giant's supereminent solo recording. What makes the darksome FTC so bottomlessly beautiful is the fact that, in its desire to resume the studious engrossments of a comforting adolescent obsession, it also updates the endless searching of an injured and incomplete spirit.

"There's anger and love and fear on this record," confides Clapton, "because I was deep into something which was exposing me this way. It's to do with the relationship that I was involved in, with a very beautiful woman, which started and ended over the same time as the record was made. We'd broken up in January or February of this year, and I went downstairs one night and I wrote that rhyme from which the record is named <'All along this path I tread/My heart betrays my weary head/With nothing but my love to save/From the cradle to the grave'>.

"I just keep falling into this cycle or trap of not being able to make a relationship work--this latest one being the first really important one I've had for many years--and it tied in with loving this music from the cradle to the grave, and my attempt to finally make a clear statement about it. I've been raw doing this, exploring myself inside, finding out who I am in a social and domestic way as much as a musical way."

Clapton sighs heavily and continues: "The front cover artwork of the album is a picture of the inside of my gate at my home in London, and it's like me living behind this gate all the time. And at the bottom of this gate is this little streak of light, which is where I'd see her feet when she walked up to ring the bell. My life is that way: as if I've been waiting behind this gate to get out and finally say what I want to say, be what I want to be, love what I want to love. And so it really runs through the whole project."

As for the order of the broad brace of rustic and urban laments on From the Cradle, Clapton says, "Each one of them spoke about a certain element of the blues that I wanted to convey, but after agonizing over it I had to call (coproducer) Russ (Titelman) in. I let him find a meaningful sequence from his own intuition, and it worked straight away for me."

The album commences with Carr's "Blues Before Sunrise," followed by Boyd and Dixon's "Third Degree," Fulson's "Reconsider Baby," and Waters's boastful 1954 single of lust and black magic, "Hoochie Coochie Man." By the time Clapton passes the midpoint of his blues transit with James's "It Hurts Me Too" and King's "Someday After a While," the listener has been immersed in one of the most diversely textured emotional excursions the form could evoke.

"I identify with all of these blues in different stages," Clapton says with a sad laugh. "They were all part of this thing I was going through in my personal life. 'Reconsider Baby' would be talking about the breakup, or 'Someday After a While' is saying you'll be sorry when you realize what a good man you lost. A lot of it is in terms of growing up, and some of it is quite childish in a way, but it's about expressing that instant emotion of anger or self-pity.

"All of these songs are the hardest I was able to pick out of the blues catalog, because they've all got a very intense character of their own; they're not jamming, but instead have distinct melodies and structures. Some of them, like 'Hoochie Coochie,' are ones I thought about in the past as being untouchable, but I thought it was important not to hide or duck or hedge the challenge."

In the act of trodding this pained path of self-examination and rediscovery, Clapton also paralleled the probative meditations of the musical heroes he holds dear. His choice of "How Long Blues," for instance, shows a sympathetic ear for the same ode to flight from one's dreary beginnings that city-bound dirt farmer Muddy Waters said was the first piece he learned as a boy. As with "Blues before Sunrise," it was penned by Nashville-born, Indianapolis-bred pianist-singer Carr, whose alcohol-and despair-steeped Vocalion sides of 1928-35 were a fierce influence on Robert Johnson. The traditional "Motherless Child" was another compassionate and self-exposing selection by Clapton, who was born out of wedlock on March 30, 1945, and was largely reared, like the orphaned Waters, by a kindly grandmother.

As with its Unplugged predecessor, From the Cradle is sufficiently fresh in its explorations that veteran fans might not recognize the full-throttle vocal thrust on "Blues before Sunrise" and "It Hurts Me Too" as Clapton's. Similarly, Eric's guitar attack is so loyal to the ethos of each ensemble piece that he has finally found the freedom to solo and/or weave a support fabric on material like "Blues Leave Me Alone," the dobro-directed "Driftin'," and initial album rock focus track "I'm Tore Down," yielding a sound so much in sync with the finest contemporary roots roll that many listeners may never peg From the Cradle as a blues treatise.

Those fortunate enough to have heard the searing May 2 concert debut of the album at the now-famous "Eric Clapton Live At Lincoln Center" benefit for the T.J.Martell Foundation know that Clapton's experience inside the blues crucible is revealed not as a dead-end condition, but rather as a triumphant quest.

"I've finally come back to where I was supposed to be with John Mayall," Clapton says. "The fountainhead of my spirit was strongest before I got disillusioned by the business, by the trappings, the personalities, the showbiz, the women, the drugs, and the bullshit. I'm back to the innocence I had in the first place; sometimes I was singing so hard I didn't even recognize myself! This was about feel and the message, rather than selling myself."

Yet it's also the most personal record he has ever released.

"Because it's the thing I've loved from day one, the most exciting and satisfying thing I've known. That's what From the Cradle means."