“I’ve been playing since I was three years old,” he laughs. “Now I’m 51, so I’ve been doing this all my life. Now I’m kind of elevated, so I’ll play blues, jazz, soul, gospel, funk – I think the key thing is to make the hair on your arms that you can’t see rise. You know what I’m saying? Give you those chill-bumps.”
Peterson is right. The blues and its many derivatives can be tabled any way you want, but at the heart of the genre is the same visceral effect that’s been there since the beginning. In his eyes, this is, and always will be, what gives meaning to the music he makes.
“First of all, you have to be able to feel it,” he says. “If you can’t feel it deep within – from your heart and from the depths of your soul – then it’s not worth doing. Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve felt it. I’ve put myself through the test.”
As a child Peterson appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show singing a cover of James Brown’s soul anthem Please, Please, Please. The music of Brown touched the young Peterson, and he cites the Godfather of Soul as the artist who awoke him to the power of music.
“He was the first person I heard who gave me goosebumps,” says Peterson. “Make It Funky Now, all that type of stuff. Then when I saw him live that really lifted me up. The only part about that was I thought, ‘Well I know I can’t dance like him’, but boy I wish I could.”
After diving into live music performance at such a young age, Peterson was taken under the wing of fellow bluesman Little Milton, playing guitar and keyboards in his band. “He was like a father to me,” he says. “I learned how to present yourself to an audience; how to feel the right way. That’s what I learned. I learned the right way how to play the blues and how to read the audience. And that’s the type of stuff I was happy to be around.”
As well as being an accomplished frontman, Peterson developed his chops playing with the likes of Etta James and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Arguably, it was his years as a hardworking sideman that allowed him to develop his guitar skills to near virtuosic levels. Peterson has never needed to rely on flurries of fast-paced notes. Instead, he developed a type of musical intuition; the ability to move with the music before the band had even gone there.
“I let my spirit do that,” he says. “My spirit will put me there. I work with the spirit and the people and it will take me where I need to go at the time I need to get there. I don’t force anything; I let everything come naturally. I rely on the audience participation to make me feel good, and when the audience makes me feel good, I want to give back to the audience. That’s what I do.”
After spending a hefty chunk of his life onstage, performance has become second nature to Peterson. In his opinion, he never feels more at home than he’s when armed with a guitar and presiding over a crowd. “I feel wonderful. I feel great when I make that connection,” he says. “I have no problems, and I don’t want any problems, unless a piece of blues decides that it wants to come over my way.”
BY JAMES DI FABRIZIO
