DURHAM -- Blues dynamo Hubert Sumlin laid down some gritty guitar licks on a swaying, clapping, crowd at the 19th annual Bull Durham Blues Festival Friday night.

A protégé of blues pioneer Howlin' Woof, Sumlin teamed with fellow headliner Pinetop Perkins, an icon in his own right, to liven up a sometimes soggy night.

"I always enjoy a show. When I was a little kid I knew what I was going to be," he said. "I have one lung. I had a heart attack. I ain't through yet. I got some things I got to do and that's music."

As rain drenched the audience leading up to the main event, Mary Hargrove of Durham huddled under a raincap and umbrella, doing her best to keep her fish dinner dry and in the cardboard container balanced on her beat-bouncing knees.

"We've been muddy before," she said in defiance of the liquid darts bounding off the rainbow sea of umbrellas and plastic sheets cropping up all around her.

"It's a cultural experience to taste the food, see the vendors, come out and have two days of fun," said Donna Spinks of High Point, a 16-year veteran of the festival.

The on-stage pairing of Sumlin and Perkins was as natural as blues lyrics are universal. The Mississippi natives were born in small, neighboring cotton towns -- Sumlin in 1931 in Greenwood and Perkins in 1913 in Belzoni.

In their formative years, they were bathed in the Delta Blues, and each attained legendary stature despite playing second banana to some of the seminal masters of the genre. Sumlin's guitar is the trademark sound on the Howlin' Wolf band's recordings, and Perkins' piano was the musical motor for Muddy Waters' band.

Aside from Howlin' Wolf, he has played with the likes of Albert King, James Cotton, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clapton, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page are among those who say Sumlin's pioneering guitar sound influenced their styles. Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead are among the groups that have recorded songs Sumlin drafted.

"The Blues Festival is one of our signature festivals, meaning it has achieved national recognition," said Reyn Bowman, president of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"About 50 to 60 percent of the people who come to our festivals are nonresidents," Bowman said. "About 40 to 50 percent of the people who come would not come except for the festival that day."

"It's unique and indigenous to Durham" and helps to shape the community's personality for visitor promotion, Bowman said. "The Piedmont Blues were pioneered in Durham as a form of music . . . Because it's pioneered here it's essentially Durham, like country music is to Nashville."

"Piedmont Blues played the way it originally occurred is a kind of upbeat, acoustic blues," he said, "more like Chicago Blues, which is very electronic.

"I don't think we've done enough yet to make that part of the community's personality year-round, and that is what we would intend to do, to encourage clubs to pick up this music," he said.

"The people who organize the festival and go there are ready to embrace a biracial vision of the future based on their common love of great music," said Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. "I think it shows, first of all, that Durham is aware of its own past because the Piedmont Blues is an important part of Durham's history. Durham was the center of it."

"The blues is a music that originated in American tragedy, poverty, discrimination, suffering," he said. "But it also embodies hope and dignity and incredible vitality. And often that vitality is expressed in enormously lively sexuality."

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