Panel and Music Maker Blues Revue
Friday, Oct. 3, 3 p.m. (panel)
and 7 p.m. (show), $25
The ArtsCenter, 300-G E Main St., Carrboro
919-929-2787, www.artscenterlive.org

Homecoming Celebration
Saturday, Oct. 4, 2 p.m., $150
The Murphey School
3717 Murphey School Rd., Durham
919-257-7609, www.sharedvisions.org

Boo Hanks has agreed to see us today. The skies are cloudy on this Friday morning, and the chance of rain is high. That means the 86-year-old bluesman won’t spend his afternoon on the tractor. Instead, he’ll meet with Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundationthe organization that changed Hanks’ life by launching his music career about a decade ago, or just before his 80th birthday.

So early in the morning, Duffy leaves from Music Maker’s headquarters outside of Hillsborough, due northeast. On the way, he shares stories of the 300-plus musicians the group has supported during the last two decades. And then we pull just past the North Carolina border into Buffalo Junction, Virginia. Hanks is waiting.

“Back then, we had some big old records that you’d play on a wind-up Victrola to reproduce the sound,” explains Hanks. “Blind Boy Fuller was playing at that time. I liked the music and the style. I started playing the style what Blind Boy was playing. That was back in about the late ’30s, early ’40s.”

For decades, though, Hanks was mostly a town secret, as very few record label representatives venture to places like Buffalo Junction, an unincorporated community of just more than 1,000 people. But Music Maker isn’t most labels. Founded in 1994 in Winston-Salem, the nonprofit has rescued legions of nearly forgotten blues, gospel, soul and country greats from the blink of permanent obscurity. They’ve turned anonymous examples of regional music strains into international emissaries.

This weekend, in a grand homecoming spread between Carrboro and Durham, the label will not only discuss the work they’ve done but demonstrate it. It begins with a panel discussion with scholar Bill Ferris and concludes with a concert that gathers the most Music Maker alumni ever assembled. Duffy’s dream will turn 20 and turn its focus toward the future.

Hanks represents the essence of Music Maker’s mission and accomplishments. He’s emblematic of surviving musicians who have the closest connection to the earliest forms of the blues. He would have loved to tour decades ago, he says, but no one ever asked. But in the last seven years, he’s played Paris, New Orleans and the Lincoln Center in New York.

“I could’ve been on the road years ago, but I didn’t have nobody to help me get established, you know what I mean?” he says. “Didn’t nobody know I could play like what I could years ago, either, and I didn’t have anybody getting me hooked up with no firm, like they’ve got me hooked up with Music Maker.”