Blues Musician Is Firmly in the Saddle : Slide Guitarist Roy Rogers Is Winning Over Audiences--Even the Trigger-Happy Ones

Last year in Knoxville, Tenn., Roy Rogers was headlining at a local nightclub.

In the audience were two elderly couples who had come to hear a legendary singing cowboy. What they got was a trim-bearded young blues guitarist.

“I told the club to give them their money back,” the blues-playing Roy Rogers recalled in a recent phone interview from his home in Marin County. “I went up to them at a break and they said, ‘No, you’re real good, and we’re checking you out.’ ”

Apparently, Rogers’ varied repertoire on slide guitar was enough to overcome any disappointment the misled customers may have had upon realizing that they were watching someone who never rode Trigger.

“They stayed through the whole set, they did not want their money back, and they enjoyed it,” Rogers said, finishing off the yarn. “That was very cool.”

Such instances of mistaken identity aren’t frequent, but they do happen, said Rogers, who playfully named his 1985 debut album “Chops, Not Chaps.”

The two Roys’ paths intersected recently at the Grammy Awards ceremonies in New York. The 79-year-old, who starred in dozens of Westerns, was nominated in the country vocal collaboration category for “Hold On Partner,” a duet with Clint Black.

Improbably enough, the 41-year-old who has been immersed in blues tradition since he took up the guitar at age 12 also found himself nominated for a country music Grammy: best country instrumental for “Song for Jessica,” a track from “R & B,” Rogers’ all-acoustic duet album with harmonica player Norton Buffalo. Rogers, who plays the Coach House on Sunday with his backup duo, the Delta Rhythm Kings, wrote the tune--a pretty reverie that sounds like a Leo Kottke piece--in honor of his 5-year-old daughter.

“That was a very bizarre situation,” Rogers said of his country Grammy nomination. “It’s not a country album, but the country market has opened up a lot these days, and that particular cut is enough of a crossover that it got some country radio play.”

The two Roy Rogers met at a party for Grammy nominees. “Now I’ve been to the mountaintop. I got my picture taken with Roy,” the younger Rogers said with a chuckle.

Any confusion can be laid to the bluesman’s older brother, who was a fan of the cowboy actor. He’s the one who suggested it would be cute for the family to name its new addition Roy.

Rogers likes to point out that Roy Rogers is his real name, while the cowboy star was born Leonard Slye. Of his three solo albums, “Chops, Not Chaps” and “Blues on the Range,” from 1989, both play on the cowboy connection (the former even ends with a brief guitar rendition of “Happy Trails”). “Slidewinder,” a 1988 release, takes its title from Rogers’ forte: he is recognized as a top practitioner of blues slide guitar.

Rogers became steeped in the blues soon after he began to play the guitar as a preteen in the East Bay community of Vallejo. His earliest teacher was Joe Wagner, an R & B guitarist who had backed Bay Area singer Sylvester Stewart before he became famous as Sly Stone. Coming across Robert Johnson’s classic slide-guitar work solidified Rogers in his calling.

Rogers was in his teens in the mid- to late-’60s, when the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Moby Grape and other stalwarts of psychedelic rock were making San Francisco a hub of American music. But Rogers continued to take his main cues from the traditional blues and R & B sounds of Chicago, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta.

“I just didn’t gravitate toward that kind of sound,” Rogers said of the ‘60s rock he encountered on trips to the Fillmore West. “I just loved the feeling of the blues, the fact that music could swing and have that emotional impact in it. Nothing against people having their own trip, but it just didn’t send me.”

Rogers began playing around the Bay Area in high school. He went to Hayward State College, earning a degree in history.

“I had aspirations to be a teacher, but I got sidetracked,” he said. Through most of the ‘70s, Rogers followed his blues calling by night while securing a living with a series of day jobs. He hooked up with harmonica player David Burgin in an acoustic duo, emerging with a 1976 album, “A Foot in the Door.”

In 1982, Rogers got his chance to break out of the Bay Area scene and begin touring. John Lee Hooker needed a guitar player, and Hooker’s bassist at the time, Steve Ehrmann, was a regular playing partner of Rogers. Ehrmann recommended Rogers, who was hired “sight unseen. John didn’t hear me until the first gig, and I hit the road with him for four years.”

“John is not demanding at all. He’s not a taskmaster,” Rogers said. “But he’s very strong in (doing) his music the way he plays it. Either you rise to the occasion, or you don’t. I was steeped in John’s music. I grew up on John’s music.”

Rogers and Hooker became close, with the blues great, now 74, encouraging him eventually to go out on his own. In 1986, Rogers left Hooker’s band and began touring with his own drums-and-bass backup unit, dubbed the Delta Rhythm Kings.

On his three solo albums, and his most recent release, the acoustic duet with Steve Miller Band member Norton Buffalo, Rogers has shown varied tastes that branch away from pure blues into funky, Little Feat-style R & B and folk-guitar music. He has honored his roots, covering at least two Robert Johnson classics on each of his three solo albums, but even then Rogers has shown a willingness to experiment--for example, by setting Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” to a hopping New Orleans rhythm.

“I don’t consider myself a traditionalist. I’m not playing to be like somebody else,” Rogers said. “It’s all borrowed stuff. It just depends on how you put it together. It would be pointless for me to try to recreate things.”

A few years ago, Rogers got a call from his old boss. Hooker, a constant presence on the blues and festival circuit, Hooker hadn’t put out a new studio album in years. Would Rogers be his producer?

“I jumped at the chance,” Rogers said. “I’d produced my own records, but this was a big one to get your feet wet on. ‘The Healer’ (Hooker’s hit 1989 comeback album) was originally to have been produced by Van Morrison. But (working with) Van never came to fruition. In my tenure in (Hooker’s) band I’d become a close friend, rather than just a side man. We developed a trust in a lot of areas. I was handling his business on the road for him. He knew I understood his music, and he knew that I had a head for business. That probably came into play.”

“Over the years I’d seen how good he was, and I knew he knew how to do it,” Hooker said in a separate interview from his Bay Area home. “We had a really close friendship, and that meant a lot.”

Hooker said he knew Rogers could produce the sound he wanted in the studio, because he had done so reliably while serving as his band director on the road.

“He would get everything just right. He knew how to conduct the sound and coach the band, and everything just fit in like a glove.”

Hooker and his manager, Mike Kappus, already had begun recruiting famous collaborators for “The Healer,” Rogers said. “The idea from the beginning was in place, to have people sit in with John who’d been influenced by him and he knew and was comfortable with.” Rogers, the rookie producer, found himself overseeing sessions involving Bonnie Raitt, the Robert Cray Band and Los Lobos, among others.

“I had no trepidation about it whatsoever,” Rogers said. “My relationship with John was solid. I knew John had the confidence in me and my judgment in the studio. You don’t produce people by imposing a certain thing. You just go in the studio and make things comfortable for people.”

“I’m in the Mood,” the session between Hooker and Raitt, won a 1990 Grammy for best traditional blues recording. “I wanted to let them look in each other’s eyes and let the music happen,” Rogers said. “Put them as close together as possible and not have a large band to gum up the works.”

Last year, Rogers was back producing Hooker’s album, “Mr. Lucky,” another star-studded affair that this time found Rogers overseeing sessions with Keith Richards, Johnny Winter, and an intimate Hooker-Van Morrison duet on “I Cover the Waterfront.”

Producing Morrison would seem to be a tough assignment: He keeps exacting control over his own music and has a reputation for being difficult.

“He’s definitely got his own way of doing things, but you have to remember that Van Morrison is deferential to John Lee Hooker,” Rogers said. “Since Van is a fan of John, that made that session go so much easier. They related well together, so you just let them go. Non-production is production in a situation like that.”

Rogers is again the producer as Hooker proceeds with work on his next album. Other musicians have put out feelers about having him produce them, too, Rogers said. He says he is open to that, “but I’m a player first.”

So far, his albums have been issued by the small San Francisco-based roots label, Blind Pig Records (the out-of-print “Chops, Not Chaps,” which Rogers released on his own, will be reissued on CD by Blind Pig this spring). While Rogers invokes the name of Stevie Ray Vaughan as evidence that anyone with a hot blues guitar has at least a chance at a major-label shot, he says his main concern is doing things his own way, without the compromises that a big-label contract might require.

“I’m 41. I’m not the new kid on the block, the next good-lookin’ guy,” Rogers said. “The music is the central focus.”

Instead of wandering down familiar happy trails, this Rogers’ highest ambition is to blaze new ones.

“I’m doing a lot of writing in new areas,” he said. “I want to take slide guitar some places where it hasn’t been.”

Roy Rogers & the Delta Rhythm Kings and Souled Out play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 496-8930.