Singer-songwriter Sperry Hunt & Friends are set to bring the balladry to Port Townsend later this month with a special outdoor concert and CD-release show at Fort Worden State Park.

The concert will celebrate Hunt’s newest album, “Story Songs,” released earlier this year.

The musicians will perform at Rainshadow Recording’s outdoor stage, located at Building 315 in Fort Worden. The concert is set to start at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 23 and tickets cost $20 each at sperryhunt.brownpapertickets.com or at the door.

Hunt grew up in Houston, Texas where he was exposed to the singer-songwriter scene of H-Town at an early age.

As a 16-year-old, he took a date to Houston’s best folk club at the time, Sand Mountain, where he had the pleasure of listening to the iconic fingerpicking mastery of country folk legend Townes Van Zandt.

Though the musical seed had been planted in Hunt’s mind, he took time to mature and find himself before music became his ultimate pursuit.

For the next few years, he lived through the thrills and ills of teenage friendships, romances, and road adventures across Texas, New Mexico, and the cantinas of the Mexican border. Hunt lost his girl to his best friend over the last summer of high school, and months later, that friend was killed in a boating accident. The unexpected passing of his friend left Hunt in a long and torturous downward spiral, inspiring his song, “The Gulf of Mexico.”

He soon immersed himself in the folk, blues, country, and border music of the local radio stations. Finally, Hunt bought a guitar and tried to put a few of his stories into songs.

Hunt married a beautiful, bright girl named Springer at 23, and soon after he began to sing covers and a few of his own songs in intimate Austin, Texas folk clubs like the Cactus Cafe.

A year later, the couple had a boy and took off for Marin County, California. Hunt opened a small guitar store in Mill Valley called Hunt & Son Guitars. He also taught songwriting for a year at the former Family Light Music School in Sausalito, and wrote a book called “Songwriting: How To Write Music and Lyrics” that was published in Los Angeles.

Hunt continued performing his own music in local clubs around California and eventually befriended and studied with master blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield. Aching to give Los Angeles a shot, Hunt and his partner lived in the City of Angels for two years while he tried to become a successful songwriter. Hunt wrote a number of songs that came to him as the soundtracks of dreams.

Recording demos and performing them at small venues, he won a prize at the Len Chandler and John Braheny’s L.A. Songwriters Showcase.

Returning to Houston for a high school reunion in 2011, Hunt began to have vivid dreams flooded with music and the few words he needed to stitch the jumble into songs. And not just songs, but story songs.

“It turned out that those years of screenwriting had prepared me for that moment. I knew where the beats should be in the stories, how to show and not tell, the elegance of brevity, and how to use setting, gesture, metaphor, and symbolism to tell a compelling tale,” Hunt said.

“The first songs were the stories of my old classmates (‘Listen to The Last Light’ and ‘Bueno the Roan’) [and] I wrote a second batch later chronicling the difficulties of people I knew more recently. For 16 months I played my songs in my own Sand Mountains; the clubs in and around Boise, Idaho where we live now,” he added.

Recently, the singer-songwriter recorded 11 songs at Rainshadow Recording in Port Townsend, resulting in the album “Story Songs.”

The record was recorded by Everett Moran of Rainshadow Recording and mixed by Conor Sisk, featuring Joe Breskin, John “Greyhound” Maxwell, Jon Parry, David “Dawg” Grisman, Bernie Reilly, and Troy Ferguson.