Three decades ago, Sonny Landreth saw something behind the glass. A hard-working slide guitar player in a blues band, he had grown frustrated at having to reconfigure his guitar to accommodate different tunings, especially when the key went from major to minor. He played bottleneck (rather than a metal slide) and one day he had an epiphany: There were sought-after notes under that glass. "I need those notes," he thought at the time. "I picked a note, pressed my finger, and a light went off." Thus, a new technique was born, one that combined slide (on his pinky finger) and conventional fretting. "You essentially get two different sounds and all kinds of oscillations and weird noises," he said in a phone interview. "I've worked to control and develop it."

It has served Landreth well. At 51, he is unquestionably one of the elite slide players on the planet.

The effect is dazzling. Amid the brassy cries and fat smears of the slide come fleet-fingered licks, spiky chords and ringing harmonics. When you hear Landreth on recordings, you're apt to wonder: How many guys are playing? Just one, thank you.

And Landreth is not just a slide slinger. He's an accomplished songwriter and able singer, with a reedy tenor that shows occasional dashes of Elvis-like tremulousness. His far-reaching style incorporates Cajun/zydeco from his hometown of Lafayette, La., swamp-rock, blues, folk and more.

"(Playing guitar) is the heart of it all," he says. "It's probably songwriting that's my first passion. I tried to write little classical compositions way back when I was a kid. But make no mistake about it, the guitar fuels everything. It's the force behind my desire to be any part of music."

The calling came early. Sonny was born in Mississippi, but moved with his family to Cajun country when he was 8. His first reaction was "culture shock," but he soon became ensconced in the area's rich ethnic ambience. Sonny first saw a Cajun band in a parking lot during a grand opening for an auto parts store. "I was fascinated by the music," he says. "Anything that involved a guitar, count me in. There's a real festival mentality around here. You name the critter, and there's some kind of recipe, and there'll be a festival. It's the food, the dance, the whole outlook on life."

Landreth had a friend whose father owned a motorcycle shop; spare handlebars made for an endless supply of metal slides. Then he became enamored with the bottleneck sound, ordered a glasscutter from TV and fashioned a slide from the neck of a big wine bottle. Later, he used Dr Pepper bottles, but finally decided on factory-made glass slides.

In the late '70s, Landreth's career got a boost when he worked under the tutelage of zydeco legend Clifton Chenier and became the first white member of his Red Hot Louisiana Band. After a year with Chenier, he played with zydeco-rocker Zachary Richard and then led his own blues band.

Word of his prowess spread through the music community and singer/songwriter John Hiatt enlisted him for his landmark 1988 album Slow Turning. Landreth released his first solo album, Outward Bound, in 1992 and followed it up with South of I-10 three years later. Both were released on the BMG subsidiary Zoo Records, and despite solid sales, Landreth found himself label-less after Zoo folded. His 2000 album, Levee Town, the final installment of a loose trilogy of Louisiana-themed discs, came out on Sugar Hill. His next project, slated for a June recording, will be a blues album.

Landreth enjoyed a certain radio presence in the '90s, due mostly to the Triple-A, or "adult alternative," radio format. With the rampant corporate consolidation of the radio industry in the last half-decade, though, he's not even worrying about airplay. "Basically, radio is a real strange beast to find any way of taming," he says. "It wasn't really gonna be my thing, anyway. Fortunately, I had other areas of income, like session work, and I own my own (song) publishing company. In that regard, I'm blessed.

"But at the end of the day, I believe that people want to hear live music."

And so he delivers, performing with just a bassist and drummer. Unlike certain other seasoned instrumentalists who become devotees of restraint, Landreth says he not the least bit recalcitrant about letting it rip. "You gotta play every note like it's your last," he muses. "'Cause you never know. "

Associate Editor Eric Snider can be reached at snider@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 114.

This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.