Digging up the roots of rock ‘n’ roll is a venerable quest for any musician and many music listeners, but for one campus fingerpicker it became another career.

Brian Thornton spends his days teaching classes and hovering around his Reavis Hall office as an associate professor of communication. But at 9 p.m. Saturday, like many nights before, the slide guitarist will team with his NIU-connected cohorts to become the Mississippi Blues Band for a performance at The House, 263 E. Lincoln Highway.

The quintet is complete with NIU communication instructor Will Anderson (bass), NIU English instructor Ellen Thornton, who also is Brian’s wife (vocals), NIU graduate Steve Chorak (guitar) and Sycamore FedEx driver Mike August (harmonica).

This group has undertaken an operation.

“For me, it’s just full-out fun. That’s the whole purpose,” Thornton said. “We’re on a mission to tell people about the history of the blues.”

The band is a tribute to the Delta Blues era of the 1920s and ’30s. It plays songs from archetypal artists like Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, Son House and Skip James.

“Like Muddy Waters said in one of the songs, the blues had a baby and they called it rock ‘n’ roll,” Thornton said. “Rock ‘n’ roll, the stuff we all listen to now, all came from the blues. That’s what this band’s about.”

The Mississippi Blues Band’s emphasis is not just to share the music, but also to reveal its stories.

“I think it’s real important for people to know that a guy like Charlie Patton was playing the guitar upside-down, in back of his head, biting the strings way before Jimi Hendrix, in the 1920s,” said Thornton, who collects and performs with vintage guitars of the ’20s and ’30s. “In between the songs, I try to tell the history of the blues, where it began, who played it and a little bit about them.”

Thornton, who has taught at NIU since 1999, reached this point of musical progress through decades of learning and experiencing the many genres of song. He started playing guitar when he was a sophomore in high school.

“I used to play rock ‘n’ roll, and sort of rhythm and blues and then I wanted to know where rock ‘n’ roll came from, so I started tracing it back,” Thornton said. “At the time when I was playing, it was like the late ’60s, early ’70s, so there’s people like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton and people like that. So I wanted to figure out where they got the music from and they start talking about people like Muddy Waters.”

You can bet he didn’t stop there.

“Then I started tracing back even further; I wanted to know where Muddy Waters got the music from, so I starting tracking down these people that I play now, like Son House, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson,” Thornton said. “And I was sort of discovering that there were these old bluesmen in the 1920s and ’30s that really sort of created rock ‘n’ roll.”

The contributions of these musicians have been neglected, he said.

“A lot of the white audience doesn’t realize how much they owe to the black bluesmen who struggled, most of them pretty anonymous in their lifetime,” Thornton said.

Thornton spent 11 years as a newspaper reporter in his native Hawaii and in Wichita, Kan. He earned his Ph.D. in communication from the University of Utah before becoming a teacher in 1985.

“I try to play music every day,” he said. “Because if I feel good, I think I’m better as a teacher, I’m feeling good about myself, I’m happy and relaxed.”

The cover charge for the show is $3. For more information, call The House at 748-2880.Courtesy photo

Brian Thornton, an associate professor of communication at NIU, will lead the Mississippi Blues Band Saturday night at The House.