Music is a family affair for Rhode Island native Forrest McDonald. His wife, Kaylon, sings in his band, and brother Steve McDonald will also sit in Saturday at an 8 p.m. gig at Chan’s in Woonsocket.

It’s been 45 years since Forrest McDonald played his first gig, at the Harrisville Civic Center with The Seagram’s 7. The drummer couldn’t play the solo of “Wipe Out,” so the keyboard player jumped behind the drums and did it. The rhythm guitar player didn’t know all the chords to “Walk, Don’t Run,” so he unplugged his amplifier for that one. It was New Year’s Eve 1964, and they each got $40.

Things have gone uphill for McDonald from there. The Rhode Island native started his career at the beginnings of the ’60s rock explosion, and he’s got the scars and the stories to prove it.

“Of the guys I started with, some are millionaires, some are broke, some are dead broke,” the guitarist says. “Some are dead and broke.”

He played with The Boston Rock Symphony, played backstage with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck at Newport, and joined the Rhode Island-based Wadsworth Mansion, who had a hit in 1971 with “Sweet Mary,” toured the nation and were washed up — literally. On tour in Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna River flooded, destroying all their equipment. Some of the band reunited in California; some didn’t make the trek.

McDonald went West and started the band Slingshot, as well as playing sessions with people such as Bonnie Bramlett and Kathy McDonald, who sang with Big Brother and the Holding Company after Janis Joplin left. He also played and recorded with a pre-Journey Steve Perry and played onstage with a pre-famous Van Halen.

But McDonald’s biggest claim to fame happened in the mid-’70s on a trip to visit his father in Alabama. He wanted to visit the legendary studio Muscle Shoals Sound, and when he got there the studio players and producer Jimmy Johnson were in the middle of a demo session. Johnson asked McDonald to strap on his guitar and throw on a guitar solo and they’d see whether he was any good.

He was, and they told him they’d let him know whether anyone picked up the song and recorded it. Months later, he got a phone call telling him that Bob Seger was not only going to do the song, but that he had bought the recording, lock, stock and barrel, and would simply put his own vocal on top of it.

Eleventy-kabillion records later, “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” and Forrest McDonald’s guitar solo are part of the ’70s-rock DNA. But that didn’t make a lot of difference to McDonald’s life at the time. He got the Stranger in Town record and excitedly looked at the back, where all it said was “Thanks to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section!” “I thought I was going to get all this session work from it, and [when I saw it] I thought, ‘Aw MAN!,’ ” he remembers with a laugh.

It took McDonald 25 years, with the release of Seger’s greatest-hits package, to get properly credited for it. Now he has a platinum record on the wall at his home in Virginia commemorating the success of the song (as well as gold records for a Bobby Womack record and backing vocals on the I Am Sam soundtrack).

After California, McDonald spent 13 years in the Atlanta area before moving to Virginia, and all the way through he’s been blues and R&B guitar, making 10 albums on his own World Talent Records and “winning over new fans one show at a time.”

Last Labor Day weekend, he came back to Rhode Island for his 40th high school reunion, and he’ll be making his first Rhode Island appearance in years this weekend.

These are challenging but rewarding times to be a blues musician, McDonald says. On the one hand, the audience for live music, especially blues, is drying up: “a lot of people don’t go out and support live music like they used to.”

As a result, the kind of “right place, right time” breaks that McDonald got are fewer and farther between for today’s musicians.

“Those people aren’t out playing in clubs. … It’s a different kind of music. But doing what I do has allowed me to maintain the link to the original blues and rhythm and blues that started it all.”

On the other, he says, the kind of technology, particularly the Internet, that is changing music is also allowing people like him to fly under the radar of the record labels and make fans all over the world.

In short, McDonald says, “Not much changes. Some gigs are better than others.”

That kind of constancy would drive some people crazy, but for McDonald it’s the other way around.

“It’s probably the one constant that I’ve got. You have all these ups and downs in your life. You have kids and they grow up and hate you … it’s a different world from when I grew up in the ’50s.”

These days, music is already a family affair for McDonald, whose wife, Kaylon, sings in the band. (“I finally have a relationship that I think can go the distance,” McDonald says of his wife, “because we’re in the same band together and we have the same goals. It’s not like ‘Oh, you’re going out there to practice again?’ ”) Brother Steve McDonald has been playing in Rhode Island for 35 years, but never on a gig with Forrest. And the band also includes Tommy Bonnariggo, formerly of Boston’s old Daddy Warbucks Band, on drums.

“It should be a good time,” McDonald says.

Forrest McDonald performs at Chan’s, 267 Main St., Woonsocket, Saturday evening at 8. Tickets are $12; call (401) 765-1900.