As the Internet turns 40 this year, one of its lesser — but still profound — successes has been the resuscitation of music artists that were once thought forever banished to the cut-out bin of history. With a cheap, near limitless platform, music obsessives around the world can excavate the dusty corners of recording history and bring back to modern ears their favorite lost and forgotten performers.

One such musician saved from obscurity is Bob Frank, the Memphis-born singer-songwriter whose respectable music career ended in 1972 shortly after it began. More than three decades later and with the help of some friends both real and virtual, Frank, who performs Saturday at Otherlands coffeehouse in Midtown, has found an audience at last for his distinct songwriting vision.

“I always write about all these losers and degenerate people, guys getting drunk and going to jail,” says Frank, helping complete the picture of him as a sort of Delta Townes Van Zandt. “I don’t know what they all are. Cowboy songs and songs about musicians and songs about guys going to the whorehouse. They’re just story songs, and they have all these little characters in them. Most of the songs are all true. They’re either people that I actually knew or things that I did myself.”

Frank has been collecting such song material for as long as he can remember. As a child he loved the songs of Gene Autry, Jimmy Driftwood, and, of course, Elvis. After starting off on a family tennis racket, he soon graduated to an actual guitar. By the early ’60s the East High School graduate had fallen into the Memphis folk scene, where he met, among others, a young Jim Dickinson, who was then staging a series of hootenannies and theater events at a makeshift performance space in the old Crosstown farmer’s market.

“Jim was an amazing guy,” says Frank of the recently deceased Dickinson, who recorded several of Frank’s songs over the years. “He gave me a lot of advice on how to write songs. … Just being around him, his sense of music would rub off on ya.”

After earning a degree from Rhodes College in 1966, Frank did a tour in Vietnam, and, back stateside, traveled the country as “one of the original hippies.” By the early ’70s he was in Nashville, trying to turn his life experiences into a music career. The distinguished folk label Vanguard Records signed Frank and in 1972 released his eponymous debut.

But just as everything seemed to be going right, everything went wrong, with more than a little help from Frank himself. Shortly after the release of his record, he played a showcase at the venerated Max’s Kansas City in New York, where, because of a feud with the label, he famously refused to play any songs from the record. With dwindling label support, Bob Frank the album sold poorly, and Frank’s career with Vanguard ended soon after.

“They just kind of dropped me off their whole thing,” says Frank with a trace of impish pride. “I don’t even exist as far as they’re concerned and that album got lost. Vanguard is owned by Sony, and they don’t know that it ever existed.”

With his music dreams pretty much in ashes, Frank moved on with his life. He relocated to Oakland, Calif., married, had children, and worked for 30 years for the city as an “irrigation specialist.”

He still performed sporadically, as a solo folk act and for a time in the ’70s with a group called the Hardheads. And he wrote songs — a lot of them.

“It just became a bad habit,” says Frank, who estimates he has thousands of unrecorded compositions. “You just sit down and start writing songs when there’s nothing else to do.”

Over the years, some other artists recorded Frank’s songs, including Dickinson and the late country singer Chris LeDoux. But Frank himself didn’t seem particularly interested in putting them down himself until he got on the Internet and discovered that there was a small but devoted following for his music.

“I found people all over Europe and Japan and Australia, all kind of places,” he says. “They had that old album and they though I died or something because they never heard from me again. In fact on one guy’s Web site in Norway he had that I died. I though it was great but once he found out I was still alive he took it down. I said you should have left it. It was the best thing ever written about me. When they think you’re gone, you become whatever they want you to be. You become perfect.”

The truth was out, so Frank restarted his aborted music career in earnest. He started a Web site, started his own label, and began recording again. His first release in 2001 was a musical adaptation of a 13th century English poem, “A Little Geste of Robin Hood”. Subsequent records, such as 2006’s World Without End, a collection of murder ballads recorded with John Murry, another former Memphian living in the bay area, have been a little more mainstream.

Since emerging from his 29-year silence, Frank, who has since retired from the city of Oakland, has been on a musical tear, issuing seven albums in eight years.

“We had to convince him not to release a record for awhile so we could release our record,” says David Less of the locally-based Memphis International label, which released Frank’s Red Neck, Blue Collar last year. Taking a cue from the title track, a celebration to the working man previously cut by Dickinson, Less culled through a pile of Frank compositions to come up with a collection highlighted by an under-explored aspect of his craft.

“He’s such a great songwriter, and he had thousands of songs,” Less says. “He presented me with all these songs, all sorts of songs. So I had to decide what he was and pick those songs that kind of identified what I though he was, which was protest singer, a true folk singer in the sense of the Weavers and Pete Seeger.”

On his newest disc, Brinkley, Arkansas, and Other Assorted Love Songs, a re-teaming with Murry and a backing group called the Lansky Brothers, Frank changes gears yet again.

Though he can now boast of a lengthy and prolific career, one thing about Frank has not changed: His general cluelessness about the music industry.

“I never knew how to make a music career. I never knew where to go or what to do next,” he says. “I still don’t. I don’t have an agent or a booking manager. I don’t have any promotion. Nobody knows I exist. So I really don’t have a career. Basically I’m just writing songs and instead of playing them at home, sometimes I play them somewhere else”.

Bob Frank with John Murry and Don McGregor

Saturday at Otherlands, 641 S. Cooper. Doors open at 7 p.m. Opening act Richard Ford goes on at 8 p.m. Admission: $7 at the door. For more information, call (901) 278-4994.