Larry Dupio headlines Honolulu BBQ & Blues Festival

The blues are almost by definition songs about hard times and sad times, heartbreak and bad times, but when Big Island blues guitarist Larry Dupio picks up his favorite guitar, his spirits soar.

“It’s the music of my soul,” Dupio said, taking a call to his home on the Big Island last week. “It frees me up from all the daily things that can happen to you or you’re confronted with every day. It’s just my time to just release all the pent-up good and bad energy. I count the hours between the times that I play.”

Dupio comes to Oahu on Saturday to close the second annual Honolulu BBQ & Blues Festival at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. John Akapo will play for the VIP early-admission ticket-holders, and Willie K is scheduled to take the stage around 5:45 for a 75-minute set that will take the event close to sunset, followed by the Trailer Park Romeos featuring Corey Funai. Dupio will take it from there.

He’ll be bringing his favorite guitar, a Les Paul Standard Sunburst that took “a while to find.”

“When you find ‘the one,’ it talks to you,” he said. “When I travel I don’t let that guitar out of my sight. Even leaving it in a hotel room makes me nervous.”

The set list will be fairly evenly divided between his own compositions and songs by some of the artists who have inspired him over the years, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Albert Collins among them.

“I still have a lot of songs that I like to play that represent my guitar heroes that I admired through the years, and the whole beauty of the blues is that I don’t think it was intended to be mimicked. I think it was intended for guys like us to take it and run with it, and I love doing that.

“The biggest part of it is the joy of doing the song and doing it to the best you can.”

The barbecue side of the festivities is the kuleana of celebrity barbecue chef Myron Mixon and the Hilton Hawaiian Village staff.

Mixon’s status comes from his staggering string of wins in barbecue competitions since he entered the field in 1996 — more than 180 barbecue grand championships and more then 1,700 wins in various contest categories. He’s also a television show host, the author of two cookbooks, “Smokin’ With Myron Mixon” and “BBQ Rules,” and the head of a barbecue products company, Jack’s Old South.

Dupio discovered the blues in the late 1960s as a teenager growing up in Kalihi. He credits Oahu guitarist Bobby Ingano, a friend since Dupio’s youth, with introducing him to the music of Albert King and B.B. King. After school they’d listen to the records at Ingano’s house and try to play what they’d heard.

“We were both combining our limited knowledge at the time (trying to) figure that stuff out, and we just loved it,” he recalled. “Living in Hawaii, as far as blues players coming here, nobody came here during that time. It was just records. I don’t know how many times I listened to the records — maybe a thousand. I wore those records out.”

None of the artists Dupio heard as a teenager hit him harder than Robert Johnson, the famed Mississippi blues master some believe acquired his talent by selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads.

“I remember hearing my first Robert Johnson record. It was really spooky. It just did something to me at that time. I wanted to know what it was ’cause I was feeling a certain way and it was so mysterious,” he said. “At the time I had an acoustic guitar, and it just lent itself to that kind of a feeling.”

Dupio and Ingano found a couple of people who shared their interest in the blues, but never enough to put a band together and take the music they enjoy playing to a larger audience.

Ingano went on to become one of the foremost Hawaiian steel guitarists of his generation.

Dupio, who is 64, served in Vietnam, came home, found Honolulu had changed in ways he didn’t like, moved to the Big Island and started a family.

“The Big Island was just what Honolulu was when I was growing up in the ’50s, and I wanted to raise a family here. I kept on playing, I never gave that up. Even though I had to have second jobs, I never gave music up.”

On the Big Island he came across Willie K, of course.

“I’ve known Willie for a lot of years,” Dupio said. “The last time we played together, we were on the same stage going toe to toe, and he’s loved that about me ever since.”

He moved to Oregon in 2001, “the day before 9/11,” and found what he remembers as “a music wonderland” with lots of blues players and lots of places to play.

“I got to learn from really good players and got to be part of the blues community. I actually played as much as I could,” he recalled. “On the mainland we could play seven nights a week if we wanted to — and make a living. At the time there was very large support for the blues, and it was really easy to get out there and play. It was just what I needed as far as that was concerned.”

Great as it was musically, 10 years of Oregon winters convinced Dupio it was time to come home. The blues scene isn’t as big on the Big Island, but he’s still active.

“I’m playing so much I don’t get much chance to see anything (else),” he said, “but if people could hear what’s in my head every day, it would be like a super station of blues.”

“Some people will play just enough to get by, but I don’t know how to do that,” he said. “I always try to put my best foot forward. I don’t know how to play any less. Full speed forward is how I do it.”