What is the least obvious environment for creating deliciously tortured and often devilish blues music?

For John Hammond, the answer is easy: church.

The pioneering singer-guitarist has been responsible for some serious soul-stirring blues testimony during the past 40 years. Just get a load of the jubilation that erupts out of Son House’s “Preachin’ Blues,” a longtime staple of Hammond’s concert performances. The tune underscores the acoustic intensity that has long defined his lean, devout blues sound, and it rejoices in salvation even though Hammond sings as if the devil were just a few steps behind him.

But it took a small, gothic-style church in the heart of the Midwest for Hammond to summon the swampy grooves and often dark blues grinds in his new album, “In Your Arms Again.”

“We went out to this old church in Salina, Kansas, that’s been used as a kind of recording studio and concert hall,” Hammond said by phone recently from his home in Jersey City, N.J. “Every October, they have a blues festival there and bring in some of the greats from the old days — people like Pinetop Perkins and Robert Lockwood. I was invited there, as well. The sound in this room was just amazing.

“Then the owner approached us and said, ‘Any time you want to make a record here, we’ll make it worth your while.’ We took him up on it.”

So Hammond; his wife and co-producer, Marla; bassist Marty Ballou; drummer Stephen Hodges; and engineer Oz Fritz set up shop in the church — renamed Blue Heaven Studio — to record the kind of music you probably won’t hear at choir practice.

Typifying the album’s often stormy mood are chestnuts by a trio of blues giants: Willie Dixon’s “Evil (Is Going On),” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Moanin’ for My Baby” and John Lee Hooker’s “Serve Me Right to Suffer.” From Hammond’s guitar attack to his emotive vocal command, the album bridges the decades. It blends the immediacy of the solo country blues recordings Hammond cut in the early ’60s for the Vanguard label with the thick but flexible band groove that drove his sublime 2001 album of Tom Waits tunes, “Wicked Grin.”

“Band reality can be tough,” Hammond said. “As a solo artist, I’m very spoiled. I don’t have to worry about anybody else. But I’ve been very lucky to find guys like Marty and Steve who are such great artists as well as such wonderful road travelers. I think we’ve boiled a band sound down to a dynamic and essential trio thing that I’m very happy with.”

Hammond’s latest tour finds him crossing paths with another blues interpreter: journeyman stylist Taj Mahal and a trimmed trio version of his popular Phantom Blues Band.

Mahal and Hammond might seem stylistic opposites, but their careers and lives share similarities. Both are native New Yorkers. Both are 62. Both have recording catalogs that go back to the ’60s. But Mahal migrated to the West Coast in 1964 and has since designed a broad-based blues sound. Sometimes it incorporates elements of African and Caribbean roots music. At others, it leans to American R&B.

Among his recent endeavors: a series of acoustic collaborations with Etta Baker, Neal Pattman and others for the Music Maker Relief Foundation. The non-profit organization recognizes and financially assists forgotten blues pioneers. An extraordinary compilation of those recordings, “Music Makers with Taj Mahal,” was released in October.

“He’s phenomenal,” Hammond said of Mahal. “He’s one of the real-deal guys out there. He’s also totally, body and soul, into the music. The guy has got so much energy and so much talent but has also been so generous with his time when it comes to supporting the blues in general.

“Taj is a statesman, a true ambassador of the blues.”