Westerly native Johnny Nicholas performs with his band The Texas All Stars at the Rhythm & Roots Festival Friday night at 8:15.

Johnny Nicholas, a Westerly native, lives mostly in Texas these days when he’s not on the road, but among his latest projects is the renovation of the legendary Knickerbocker Café, the Westerly blues joint that played a pivotal role in launching the careers of southern Rhode Islanders such as himself, Duke Robillard, Greg Piccolo and more.

Similarly, Nicholas’ latest record is new and old at the same time.

Bocce Boogie is a homemade recording of a performance by Nicholas (a member of Asleep at the Wheel at the time), Sugar Ray Norcia, Ronnie Earl and the legendary harmonica player Big Walter Horton at a 1978 party celebrating the wedding of Nicholas’ brother at the Bocce Club, in Westerly.

Backed with a rhythm section of Ted Harvey and Mudcat Ward, the recording is “a perfect storm, in a good way,” Nicholas says.

He describes the atmosphere of the recording as friendly and informal, but also said it was “head-cuttin’ time. . . . You might love someone, respect them, but when you get on stage together, you want to kick their [expletive].”

His cousin, Dick Koulbanis, recorded the set on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and everyone promptly forgot about it, Nicholas says. Last year, on tour in Los Angeles, Nicholas hooked up with his cousin, who had found the tapes.

“You don’t remember we recorded that?,” Nicholas remembers his cousin asking. “Hell, I don’t remember a lot of [stuff] from back then,” he replied.

“The sound quality is usually really bad” on such one-microphone recordings, but Nicholas put it on during a drive and “it completely blew my mind.” He contacted Walter’s daughter (Walter died in 1981), Ronnie, Sugar Ray, “all the guys,” to get their OK, and it came out on Top Cat Records, the label for which Nicholas records, earlier this year.

Nicholas’ self-assessment is basically accurate. You won’t mistake it for a studio record, but you can hear some of the roots of the next 30 years of the Rhode Island blues scene in one spot on Bocce Boogie. It’s got groove, it’s got solo power, and you can hear it all clearly, but with a grit that makes it real.

In the meantime, Nicholas is in Rhode Island for the weekend, at Rhythm & Roots tomorrow with The Texas All-Stars — his regular band plus a cast of cameo performers including Danny Levin, fiddler with Asleep at the Wheel — and in a set Saturday with Marcia Ball .

Sunday, he’ll play with all of them, and Greg Piccolo, in the ballroom of the Mystic Hilton, in Connecticut.

Then he’s off to Greece for a week, then back to Rhode Island to check in on the Knickerbocker, then off to play back home in Texas and Louisiana.

You can hear the hammering and banging of the Knickerbocker restoration project in the background when you talk to Nicholas on the phone.

“It’s a huge project,” Nicholas sighs, recounting how the walls were bare down to the studs when they began last year. Currently, the front room is open for food and drink, and he projects that “the big room” will be ready for music in a couple more months.

“Everything will look like it did in 1950,” Nicholas says, “but clean and up to code.”

Having a nice place to play, eat and drink is an important part of the blues, Nicholas says. The image of blues as a musical form that exists in dirty, dingy, dangerous places is a media-created myth, he says.

“The blues is really very understandable music for regular folks. It never ceases to amaze me, the kinds of people who really dig the blues and really understand it.”

Nicholas went to live in Chicago in the late ’60s, and recalls that “Howlin’ Wolf and his band all lived in the same neighborhood. They looked out for each other. You went to the clubs, the clubs were nice, they were clean. They weren’t dumps . . . that stink.”

He singles out The Blues Brothers as people who “had really good intentions, but real blues guys don’t wear dumpy black suits and stupid sunglasses, and they don’t stink, and they’re not criminals. They did such a disservice to the music. . . .

“It’s well-intentioned, but it’s hokey. It’s sort of become a parody of itself. But it doesn’t matter, because the real stuff is always there.”

Such as in southern Rhode Island, where the blues is played in restaurants and nice clubs.

“South County’s the home of the blues, man. Not to put down Providence,” he says, noting the many fans and the many shows at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel and the late Last Call through the years, “[but] we’ve got the connection down here.”

As the liner notes to Bocce Boogie point out, the record ends with an audience member exclaiming: “ ‘This is Rhode Island?!?!’ Yeah, this was and is the blues in southern Rhode Island,” Nicholas writes.

“The only other place in the country like this,” Nicholas says, “is south Louisiana and the whole Cajun scene, and a lot of Texas with the country scene. Just the way a whole lot of people go out and enjoy music in a real natural way.”

rmassimo@projo.com