Organizer Is Talking a Blues Streak : Music: Kevin Morrow, who hopes to create a major blues festival for San Diego, is laying the foundation with his annual event at the Belly Up.

Because the blues is rooted in the pain, hardship and frustration of post-Reconstruction blacks, it is customary to think of the musical form only as a purgative--a medium for releasing and expressing deep-seated feelings.

However, when you hear bluesman Jimmy Rogers, at age 67, applying his emery-board vocals to “Chicago Bound,” an up-tempo “jump” blues tune he wrote 40 years ago, you are reminded that the blues is also a preservative. Intact in Rogers’ voice is the often paradoxical mix of loss, anger, hope and wanderlust unique to the experience of itinerant blues musicians of the first half of this century. Like many of his contemporaries, guitarist Rogers is a living document of an important chapter in modern American history.

On Sunday, the “Fourth Annual Belly Up Tavern Blues Festival” will pay tribute to the blues tradition by bringing Rogers, mouth-harpists Billy Boy Arnold and Carey Bell, guitarist Luther Tucker, bassist David Myers and Bay Area guitarist Andy Santana (no relation to Carlos) and his band, the Soul Drivers, to the Solana Beach venue.

The event is the brainchild of Kevin Morrow, 38, who is trying to do some preserving of his own. The artist manager and agent is an admitted blues fanatic who devotes a considerable amount of time to keeping the blues flame alive. Although promoters largely indifferent to the music earn easy money booking popular blues acts such as B.B. King and Robert Cray, Morrow concentrates on securing work for less-heralded or almost forgotten veterans such as Pinetop Perkins, Clarence (Gatemouth) Brown, Joe Louis Walker or Katie Webster.

Morrow also has a barely concealed agenda: He hopes someday to organize a blues festival in San Diego on the order of famous, large-scale events in Long Beach and San Francisco. Such an occurrence might be a few years away, but Morrow has been laying solid groundwork with the Belly Up’s annual festival, which in past years has brought such artists as Earl King, Pee Wee Crayton and Alex Moore to town. Yet, for all his entrepreneurial efforts, Morrow deflects any credit directed at him.

“The bottom line is the music,” he said this week in a phone conversation. “I’m just a blues lover trying to put together a bunch of club-size acts to give blues people more for their buck. And, hopefully, in the process people will get turned on to some great artists they might not have been aware of.”

Rogers fits that description. Blues purists know him as a stylistic link between the folk-derived blues of Big Bill Broonzy and the more modern, urban blues of Freddie King. Born in Mississippi and raised in Atlanta, Rogers moved to Chicago in the late ‘30s and eventually made his mark playing in the legendary Muddy Waters Band. While still with Waters, Rogers formed his own band and later would earn accolades for such contributions to the blues literature as “Sloppy Drunk,” “Walking by Myself” and “Chicago Bound.”

As it turns out, Rogers is not the only Waters alumnus in Sunday’s lineup, and Morrow feels that the generic common ground of the artists will give this program a special flavor.

“With the exception of Santana, all of these guys are Chicago blues musicians who played with Muddy Waters and Little Walter, so you’re really going to get that ‘50s-’60s Chicago blues feel at this show,” Morrow said. “I think the coolest one of the bunch, though, the guy that people are going to dig, is Billy Boy Arnold. There’s a certain beat he does that’s similar to a Bo Diddley thing, but bluesier, and it just has an effect on audiences.”

Rogers has been here before: Morrow booked him into the long-defunct Mandolin Wind several years ago, and later the vocalist-guitarist was part of a blues revue Morrow imported to the Belly Up from Antone’s, the Austin, Tex. blues club and record company. Others for whom Sunday’s program is a return engagement are Bell, a master of the chromatic harmonica and veteran sideman with John Lee Hooker and Eddie Taylor; and Tucker, a superb guitarist and product of Chicago’s postwar blues scene, who has played with Hooker, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson and James Cotton. Arnold, Myers, and Santana are making their local debuts.

Morrow said that, though Bell and Santana are bringing their own bands along, people can expect some exciting cross-pollinating.

“At some point in the show, we’re going to see all the Chicago guys jamming together,” he said. “These guys have all known each other for decades, and most of them have played together at one time or another, so it’s a natural. For anyone who loves the blues, and especially Chicago blues, this is going to be a lot of fun.”

“The Fourth Annual Belly Up Tavern Blues Festival,” featuring Jimmy Rogers, Billy Boy Arnold and Luther Tucker will begin at 6 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $7. The Belly Up is at 143 South Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. For more information, call 481-9022.