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It's all Mrs Hare's fault. When he was a nipper in a comfortable Oxford household, an Eton boy and the youngest son of a GP, Hugh Laurie was told to learn the classical horn. He lasted three weeks. Mrs Hare's efforts to teach him the instrument came to naught. But she did leave one lasting impression on young Laurie: one day, flipping to page 26 in the book of sheet music, she came across 'Swanee River'. 'Negro spiritual, slightly syncopated,' she said drily to her pupil. She wasn't, it was clear, much interested.

But Laurie was intrigued. Over the following decades, via his self-taught piano ramblings and enthusiastic record-shop research, he went on to explore the traditional American song – its genealogy, its rhythms, its meaning, its emotional power.

Now, at age 51, after a lifetime digging the blues, 'Swanee River',' says the actor, 'means a lot to me. 'Pete Johnson did the first boogie-woogie version,' he expands, 'and he played about five million miles an hour – because boogie-woogie back then was sort of the heavy metal of his day. Pete Johnson was a shredder – he would absolutely tear it up. That was part of the thrill of it, [hearing] that sort of virtuosity.'

Other records that mean a lot to the star of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, Stuart Little and (currently approaching the end of its seventh season) hit American medical drama House: 'I Can't Quit You Baby', by Willie Dix, which Laurie heard when he was 11 or 12, and which he credits as being the first blues song to make the 'hairs on the back of my neck stand up'; Muddy Waters' Live at Mr Kelly's on second-hand vinyl, which was the first album he bought; and all 15 of the standards (including 'Swanee River') the actor covers on his own first album. Let Them Talk is the sound of one man's passion, and it's very – you might say surprisingly – good.

Laurie is the first to admit it's an unlikely scenario. Indeed, on paper, of all Britain's 1980s-era alternative-comedy veterans, his old Cambridge Footlights chum Stephen Fry is arguably a more likely candidate to be singin' the blues. Fry's psychological CV takes in a famously troubled youth, a stint in jail and depression. Laurie, meanwhile, is currently the highest-paid actor on American television, has some 25 million Facebook 'likes' courtesy of the popularity of Dr Gregory House, and is a heart-throb across the world. As he writes with pithy self-deprecation by way of introduction to the album: 'I was not born in Alabama in the 1890s. You may as well know this now. I've never eaten grits, cropped a share or ridden a boxcar. One Direction Up All Night Album Torrent Download Kickass.