Saturday night and Sunday morning

The gospel blues of Saginaw’s Sharrie Williams will bring the bells of Sunday morning to the Saturday night grooves of Old Town BluesFest.

Williams’ radiant, bigger-than-pain voice fuses blues and gospel into one irresistible force, diagnosing your ills with the former and healing you with the latter.

“Back in the old days, religious people believed that the blues was the devil’s music,” Williams said in a phone interview. “But the blues and gospel are so close together. They both tell a story. That’s what all music should do.”

One of Williams’ most treasured recordings is “Soon I Will Be Done,” by gospel icon Mahalia Jackson.

“Now that’s a soul-stirring song,” she cried. Suddenly, her voice surged through the wire: “Soon I will be don-n-n-e … with the trou-uh-uhuh-bles of the world.”

Even at 5 percent intensity, she made the word “troubles” tumble down, down, down, like a crystal river over cold, black rocks.

Williams still lives in her hometown of Saginaw, close to her family and friends, despite a decade of success touring Europe and other parts of the world. Her latest CD, “Blues Out of the Dark,” won the Blues Album of the Year award from France’s L’academie du jazz in 2012.

She found the blues after a difficult period in her personal life in the 1990s.

“I got into the blues because I was blue,” she said. “The blues helped me come out of my pain. I don’t like to see people down and out, trapped, stuck in their pain.”

Her first love, gospel music, set the stage for a life in song. At 12, Williams performed in church groups with gospel legends Shirley Caesar, the Winans and James Cleveland.

Williams said the turning point in her career was the first time she sang with her own band at a jazz and blues festival in the Netherlands in 2002. The audience went wild and bought a ton of her CDs afterward.

“That night defined a lot of things in my life,” Williams said. She said she learned two things: She was good enough to rub elbows with the music’s top artists, and her band was good enough to support her.

“There was no question after that,” she said. “This is what you love to do and you can do it.”

In 2007, having already subdued Europe, she was finally picked up by Canadian-based label Electro-Fi. Since then, she has released two CDs: “I’m Here to Stay” and “Blues Out of the Dark.”

She composes many of her songs. The pleading ballad “Jealousy” diagnoses the “cancer” eating away at a doomed relationship. “Rest in Peace” looks at death headon: “Every time I look around, it seems like somebody else has split the scene.”

The CDs have been lauded by critics, but they only convey a fraction of the incandescent Williams persona. Her voice can run clear as a spring, storm like the ocean or take on a muddy Mississippi roll. On stage, she consoles, pleads, seduces, jokes and hurls the occasional thunderbolt of righteous wisdom.

“We’re supposed to love on people and that´s what we do,” she said.

She confesses to only one outside interest, besides her church ministry:

“When I´m not singing, I´m singing.”

A little toughness

After conquering the passionate but limited Australian blues scene, Harper (aka Peter D. Harper) parked his harmonica and hung his didgeridoo in Grass Lake, Mich., in 2006. He hasn´t looked back since.

“The people in Michigan made the difference,” he said. “They´re down to earth, hard workers. As Australians, we think the same. I guess there’s a little toughness there.” A recording contract with Ann Arbor-based Blind Pig Records didn’t hurt.

Harper brings his muscular mélange of blues and rock, backed by Detroit-based band Midwest Kind, to BluesFest Friday night.

He is profoundly indifferent to the “world blues” label marketers stick on his music, but he understands why it stuck.

“(They think), ‘He plays harmonica, so it’s blues, and he plays didgeridoo, so it´s world music, so let´s call it world blues,’” Harper said disdainfully. “Whatever. That´s not looking too deeply. I’m influenced by many things.”

He loves vintage punk, folk and symphonic music. He’s played for the queen of England, traded licks with Muddy Waters and soloed with the Melbourne Philharmonic.

Harper uses the didgeridoo the way Bach uses a pedal point: As a low, sustained drone that bolts the music to the bedrock as chord changes shift above like tectonic plates. “With that pedal underneath, you can actually move over it,” he said. “Sometimes you get discords, which is fine. I’ve had people argue with me about putting a B bass underneath a C chord, but that’s a deliberate thing I did for an emotional feeling. In music there are no rules.”

Growing up, Harper was pickled in music by both of his grandfathers, one of whom was a concert pianist and the other a bluesloving bar singer. The latter gave him his first harmonica. Together, they listened to old blues records by the likes of Waters and Bukka White.

Blues guitar master Albert King fascinated Harper, but he never mastered the guitar.

“My hands were not meant to do it,” he said. Instead, Harper hangs his harmonica lines on a taut string of melodic logic, a unique style in the blues world. “That’s because I´m a frustrated guitar player,” he said. “I emulate what they do.”

Harper´s many original tunes deal with a variety of themes, from blues staples like misery and heartbreak to the karma of modern politics. “I don´t preach, I just suggest,” he said. “Politics is an interesting game and I like to get involved in musical terms.”

When Harper first started touring America in the 1990s, Lansing’s own Frog, of Frog & the Beeftones, was a frequent collaborator. “We used to do the Green Door,” Harper said. “Those were great times. We did places like the Fifth Avenue Billiards in Royal Oak, the Soup Kitchen in Detroit. I used to go to my favorite music store on the planet, Elderly Instruments. Lansing has a great history.”

(Frog, aka Steve Forgey, will appear twice at BluesFest, once with the Beeftones on the North Stage at 6 p.m. Saturday and in a duet setting with harmonica player Dave Matchette at the MICA Stage at 4:15 Saturday.)

Harper is still adjusting to his fateful move from island nation to peninsular state. Back in Australia, he was an avid open-ocean sailor and surfer. His anthem “Sailing Australia (America´s Cup Theme)” earned him a Gold Record. Michigan is almost surrounded by water, “but it´s that weird freshwater,” Harper said. “I’m used to the salt stuff. It doesn´t have the same lift.”

Kayaking has proven a splendid substitute, though. “I’ve always loved my water and you guys have more lakes than people," he said. "It´s a beautiful state and you´ve got great brews here."

Nevertheless, about this time each year, he has to brace himself for the onslaught of cold. “I’ve been here eight years,” he said. “You think I´d get used to it.”

Living the blues

Veteran Lansing guitarist/singer/composer Greg Nagy used to tell reporters he was influenced by the way blues legend Albert King could bend notes on the guitar. Now he’s less interested in talking such “insider baseball” about what goes into his art.

“It’s all sounds, not just music,” he said. “It’s life experiences. Every single facet of our collective existence, how we live, is an influence. My divorce after 25 years of marriage that I didn’t see coming was an influence.”

Whoa. Hold on right there.

No wonder Nagy sounds like a man who’s been tinkering lovingly at his vintage Mustang for weeks is now ready to drive it off a cliff. With his divorce close to final and his next CD about to drop, Nagy is living the blues at an uncomfortably high pitch.

Months ago, Nagy and keyboard man Jim Alfredson, his former bandmate in the soul blues group Root Doctor, collaborated on a searing after-the-breakup song. “I Won’t Give Up,” released as a single this summer, will surely be the centerpiece of Nagy’s unnamed forthcoming CD. The recording is so raw it’s hard to believe it was waxed before Nagy’s real breakup.

“I had no idea this song would be so useful,” Nagy said. “Talk about life imitating art. It´s almost creepy.”

“Stranded,” another new song that will appear on the CD, was written for Nagy by Grammy-winning Jeff Parris, one of the nation’s top blues songwriters. Parris heard what Nagy was going through and gave him a song to fit his mindset.

Nagy’s national profile started rising when his first solo CD, “Walk That Fine Thin Line,” charted at No. 3 on XM Satellite Radio and got him a Best New Blues Artist nomination from Memphis’ Blues Foundation.

Rolling Stone critic Ken Bay put Nagy in the “upper echelon” of contemporary blues performers and dubbed his second CD “Fell Toward None” one of the best releases of 2011, regardless of category.

That really pleased Nagy, an avid category hater.

“I have a lot of reverence for the blues, but when it comes to storytelling, I just want to connect however I can,” he said. “Modern blues, soul blues, jazz blues — I don’t get caught up in that whole Aristotle’s Categories thing.” (Aristotle didn´t get around to categorizing the blues, but he would have.)

Veteran Lansing keyboardist Mike Skory will sit in on Friday’s BluesFest gig, with veteran Michigan musicians Joseph Belose on bass and Glinn Giordano on drums.

Old Town BluesFest

Sharrie Williams:

9-10:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 20 — South Stage Harper & Midwest Kind 7-8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19 — North Stage Greg Nagy 8 p.m.-9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 19 North Stage (for full BluesFest schedule, see insert)