Ellis' blues always a treat for Salt Lake City

Guitarist Tinsley Ellis has been playing his brand of blues professionally for more than 30 years.

The Atlanta-based musician has made sure Salt Lake City has been on his tours for the past 20 years, and he is looking forward to his gig at The State Room next week.

"We've played so many different places over the course of 20 years — from the Zephyr to the Dead Goat and now this," Ellis said during a phone interview from his hotel in Amarillo, Texas. "I've been online looking at (The State Room) and think it will be exciting."

Ellis got into the blues thanks to the British blues tunes of early Fleetwood Mac, Cream and the Yardbirds.

They led him to American Blues master B.B. King.

"They all talked about B.B. King in their interviews," Ellis said. "And my friend said I should go see B.B. King."

Seeing King live sealed Ellis' choice to play music for a living.

"It was the pure emotion of Mr. King's concert that I saw that drew me to the genre," Ellis said. "I loved the fact that he would sing a little and play a little on the guitar and go back and forth. And it was so emotional, and I'd never seen anything like it before."

When Ellis started off playing at fraternity parties in Atlanta, he pretty much copied King and others.

"I was also a fan of another blues-rock band from Atlanta called the Allman Brothers Band," Ellis said. "I knew I would never be a B.B. King, but I could kind of be like the Allman cats with the long hair and Marshall amps and Les Paul gutiars."

Still, there were a whole new set of challenges that Ellis had to overcome while moving beyond the frat parties.

"Age and race come to mind," Ellis said with a little laugh. "There were not a lot of blues acts on the road really doing anything of merit when I first tried in 1979. Then Stevie Ray Vaughan came along in 1983 and held the door open for us, and we all sort of waltzed in behind him.

"We could use another hero like that," Ellis said of Vaughan, who died in a helicopter crash in 1990.

While Ellis knows of bands and artists who do the retro-blues thing with the hairstyles and clothes, he prefers to let his music set the tone.

"We just come out and be ourselves," he said. "I think that will take me farther than riding a wave of a trend, like the swing bands did a while back.