When blues guitar legend Phillip Walker was a kid - oh so many moons ago - an older musician named Clifton Chenier taught him his most important lesson: give your audience the same love and respect they give your music.

While decades' worth of blues legends have come and gone, Walker has toiled in comparative obscurity. He's not well-known, like Buddy Guy or B.B. King, and he's not the first guy quoted as an influential hero by Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck. But he is still working as much as he wants.

Walker plays tonight on the opening night of the eighth annual Edmonton's Labatt Blues Festival in Hawrelak Park. He'll be backed by the Texas Horns, the same section that supported him along with Long John Hunter and Lonnie Brooks on Alligator Records' Lone Star Shootout a few years back.

"My aspiration really came from Cliff Chenier and it was grounded in me so deeply when I got with him that, after three or four years on the road, I caught the hang of it," Walker says. "And after that I just felt it was the only way to keep the real tradition of the blues going, to stick to the real thing. That's why I've been ground to the highway in an old van with a few musicians ever since."

Walker is a down-home guy still, respectful of his rural roots on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and into Texas. His CD covers have more often than not featured him in a natty suit and tie, but he's more likely to be wearing jeans or overalls, climbing under the van to ensure it'll stay on the road for another 200 nights. While the money and adoration are exponentially more available in Europe, he spends most of his year on U.S. highways and byways.

"I still love coming into a town, being interviewed by the paper or radio, meeting with the club people and the local people. It's always just looked like the right way to go," he says. "It's my 54th year of it now, and it's still the thing I love in life the most."

For many years, however, Walker played second fiddle. His first recording gig was as a sideman to the great boogie-woogie pianist Roscoe Gordon, and he went on to long-supporting stands with the likes of Eddie Taylor, Etta James, Lowell Fulson and Little Richard.

In the early '60s, he settled on the West Coast and married Ina Beatrice, a substantial singer and songwriter in her own right, who performed as 'Bea Bopp.'

The West Coast scene opened his eyes to the region's growing reverence for Texas blues - the modern West Coast sound is really just an extension of the early Texas players who moved there around the same time, players like T-Bone Walker and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Soon, Walker started putting together and fronting his own combos, figuring his tenor voice was not unlike that of Ray Charles.

"Blues was jukebox music and has never been commercially successful, aside from a short period in the late 1940's and early '50s," Walker says.

"So the music was supposed to be gone a long time ago, but the fact that it's one of the originators - one of the original forms of American music - is why there's always some kid coming up who wants to play it. I always say I think it's due to come back stronger than ever.

"And that's the music business. It's all perception and politics. The music don't change. The business side is as much or more about politics than it is a representation of how good the music actually is."

Walker never had kids, which he says helped him keep both his sanity and perspective.

He doesn't have lavish tastes, so paying the bills is good enough, as long as he gets to do what he wants, which is one more road trip.

This is, after all, a guy who admits he "could've cried" when he heard the King Eddy in Calgary had shut down.

"It drove me nuts for a long while - you can imagine how it might after 54 years in the business - that the money wasn't there," he says. "But I think a lot of the reason guys get depressed is not being able to take care of their family and do what they do. It puts a weight on them, because for a musician, family ties you down. I never had kids, so I didn't have that to deal with and eventually I came to terms with the fact that I was still making a living doing what I love.

"I never saw a blues cat get rich, unless he get lucky and it fall out of the sky on him. But I'm a travelling person. It's what I love."