HE’S RED HOT FOR RETURN OF THE BLUES

Smokey Wilson is making sure that the Pioneer Club’s stage is ready for the weekend. He’s checking the microphones, testing the monitors and tightening the cymbals on the drum kit.

His job is not an easy one. Ever since he opened the 200-seat blues nightclub in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1972, he has been working weekdays as manager and weekend nights as performer.

Somehow, he has also managed to find time to record three critically acclaimed solo albums, help organize the prestigious Long Beach Blues Festival and play half a dozen or so concerts a month around the country.

He will appear tonight at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach.

Wilson, 50, is a one-man booster club for the blues. But he doesn’t mind the work. He’s merely doing his part, he said, to help focus the public spotlight back on a type of music that has been in the dark for far too long.

“The kids have done heard everything you can think of in rock ‘n’ roll,” said Wilson, who sings and plays guitar. “From Chuck Berry to Kiss to Michael Jackson, all that loud shoutin’ and shakin’ has been busting their eardrums for a long, long time.

“Now they’re ready for something different. And all you got to do is take that same hot rock ‘n’ roll, turn it around, slow it down, and you’re right back in the blues field.

“The blues are the roots of all this modern music. And no matter how much break-dancing or fast-rappin’ the kids might be doing today, the roots always have a way of coming back.”

While most other blues revivalists who share his views, like the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Robert Cray, are recent converts to the blues, Wilson has close ties to the originals.

He grew up in the Mississippi Delta during the 1930s and ‘40s and learned by watching such legends as Elmore James, Little Milton and Howlin’ Wolf play tiny roadhouses like the Rolling Fork and Ruby’s.

Ruby’s, he added proudly, is owned by B.B. King’s former mother-in-law, and that’s where he began jamming with some of his heroes when he was only 17.

“I’m going to tell you something, but you might not want to believe me,” Wilson said. “Anything I want to play, I can pick up my guitar and start playing right away.

“I think it’s been a good 17 years since I last rehearsed before a show. It could have been longer. And you know why? God taught me what I know. No one ever taught me those chords, no one ever told me where to put my fingers on the fret.

“I heard those old guys, and that sound just stayed in my head. I used to listen and look and see what they were doing, and I was able to learn, just like that.

“And the talent that God gives you, no one can ever take away.”

Wilson has been making a living with the blues since 1962, when he lost a leg in a trucking accident and turned to music, full time.

But only recently has his career started to take off.

Through appearances at the Long Beach and San Francisco blues festivals, Wilson has earned a reputation as “the man of a thousand voices” for his ability to emulate the vocal stylings of such masters as Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James.

But Wilson does a lot more than merely mimic; his own songs, written in classic Delta blues style, have been recorded by such prominent blues labels as Big Town Records (also home of “Big” Joe Turner and Johnny “Guitar” Watson) and Murray Brothers Records of Riverside.

Still, he said, he has yet to make a record he is 100% satisfied with.

“The record companies always put a rock band behind me,” Wilson said. “But that’s not authentic enough for me.

“What I need to do is slow down even more. I’m not going to play with rock musicians any more; the musicians I’m looking for are the kind who know what it’s like to pull up corn stalks and load the corn in the wagon, and then come home after doing that all day and play the music that’s in their hearts.

“And when I find men like that, I tell you, I’m going to make me one hell of an album.”