Singer-songwriter Pierce Pettis, best known for his 2004 release “Great Big World” from Nashville’s Compass Records, got his start playing at the Brotherhood of Thieves. The album, named one of the top-10 albums of the year by several folk-radio stations including Boston’s WUMB, has catapulted Pettis to “the highest level of obscure success,” he told the Inquirer & Mirror.

A few years after graduating from college in the mid-1980s, Pettis played a gig at the old Brotherhood of Thieves restaurant. The audience was rowdy, and the restaurant’s owner and staff were all great people, he said.

After living for 25 years in cities throughout the Southeast, Pettis returned to his home in Alabama seven years ago.  “After all these years I’ve sort of come full circle – like salmon who come back to their spawning grounds,” Pettis said last week. And now, after a 20-year hiatus from Nantucket, Pettis will return to the island Friday, with an 8 p.m. show at Bennett Hall on Centre Street. Island folk musician Chuck Colley and the Chuck Colley Trio will open.