Guitarist, singer and songwriter Alvin Youngblood Hart's acclaimed first release, BIG MAMA'S DOOR, earned three 1997 Living Blues Critics Poll Awards Best Blues Album, Best Debut Album and Best Traditional Album of the Year. On his compelling Hannibal Records debut, TERRITORY (HNCD 1431), he both revisits and broadens the rich territory lie so mesmerizingly explored. Shaped by influences ranging from Leadbelly to Frank Zappa, Hart roams and rambles through a musical landscape of roots and blues, waltz time and western swing, upbeat ska and avant-garde electric guitar. The result is a work by an artist looking beyond labels and limits to simply follow his muse.

Equally impressive as multi-instrumentalist and musical scholar, Hart was well ahead of the revivalist curve in his passion for acoustic country blues. Arid while his skills in that form are in ample evidence, he prefers to see it as one aspect of a greater sensibility. He's as conformable fingerpicking a Stella six-string as he is driving an amp to feedback with his weather-beaten Strat, a truth to which TERRITORY bears convincing testimony.

Winner of the 1997 W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist, the versatile 35-year-old musician has been at his craft for some time. Completely self-taught, he began playing the guitar in earnest at age 14, tooling around in garage bands, soaking up the earthy blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and the rumble of Link Wray, along with the more skyward flights of Jimi Hendrix and Zappa.; "I never really was away from the blues," Alvin recalls. "All the time that I was learning about pop music of that period, I was learning about the blues."

Born in Oakland, California, Hart moved around the country with his family wherever there was work to be found -- Southern California, Ohio, Illinois. Along the way, he listened to music wherever he could find it, be it his parents' records, the ever-present radio or on Chicago's famed Maxwell Street, where he hung out with grizzled blues vets. But the most lasting impressions of his youth came from frequent trips to his grandmother's home in the hill country of northern Mississippi, where bloodlines on both sides of his family run back for generations. On those visits, he found people living a lifestyle that was time out of mind and developed an affinity for certain traditions that had no place in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

"So much of myself goes back so far there," he says. "It's important to me to hold on to a little bit of something from the different cultures that evolved the area from which I evolved. The music is one part of it, perhaps the easiest part of it. It's a thread I can bring forward."

Those excursions to Mississippi led him to a deep appreciation of his acoustic blues forebears and he steeped himself in their music -- Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Bukka White, Blind Willie McTell, Skip James and others. He began collecting all manner of vintage stringed instruments, learning to play them, and eventually to restore them. By 1986, living in Los Angeles, he grew dispassionate about the electric blues scene and turned full time to performing "unplugged" long before it became a marketing strategy. But with little support from most audiences and the music industry for his brand of blues, Hart opted to join the Coast Guard in 1986. As fate would have it, he ended up stationed on a riverboat in Natchez, a few hours ride from the family home. He began to play regularly in front of audiences. "There was a saloon in Natchez, a kind of an outlaws-plus-tourists type place, and I'd play music in this bar or even outside in the daytime, playing for tips. Whatever band had the weekend gig, they'd have me sit in with them, playing Muddy Waters, Wilson Pickett, whatever songs we all knew."

Seven years in the Coast Guard took him from Natchez to New York to Bolinas, California, where he found a niche in the Bay Area music scene. At a guitar store, he met Heidi Loetscher, who shared his passion for restoring old instruments -- he ended up marrying her. He also befriended bluesman Joe Louis Walker, who invited Alvin to open for him at several local gigs in 1990. A year later, he made his first appearance at the San Francisco Blues Festival. His hitch up with the Coast Guard, Hart continued to play where and when he could.

Over the past two years, Alvin has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. He has appeared on national tours including the Furthur Festival and House of Blues Presents, sat in on electric guitar with the Allman Brothers Band, and supported musicians ranging from Neil Young, Los Lobos, Richard Thompson and Ben Harper to blues greats John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal, Buddy Guy and Gatemouth Brown. In addition to headlining his own club dates, Alvin has played major festivals throughout the world, from Australia to Norway. He contributed two tracks ("Sway" and "Moonlight Mile") to the Rolling Stone's tribute album FAINT IT BLUE, recorded with the late Junior Wells on his Grammy-winning COME ON IN THIS HOUSE, and with Vernon Reid on a tribute to the late great Hound Dog Taylor.

These days, when he's not playing music or tinkering with old instruments, most of his time is spent with his one-year-old son, who Alvin says sounds not unlike Thelonious Monk on piano. As for future goals? "Just to get my hands on as many instruments as I can and get a song out of them.