Sonny Landreth has been playing gigs around Louisiana since he was 16. He started touring professionally at 20. At 71, he is looking back on more than 50 years of making music.
“I used to think about those old blues cats,” he said in a phone interview Monday. “Suddenly, I’ve met the criteria and I’m one of them.”
Landreth is considered by the likes of Eric Clapton to be “probably the most underestimated musician on the planet, and also probably one of the most advanced.” In guitar speak, he’s not your average guitar player, best known for playing slide guitar — and the special technique he uses, which involves playing chords and chord fragments by fretting behind the slide while he plays. To give his other fingers more room, he plays with the slide on his little finger. He has said he learned the technique as a youngster at Prof Erny’s Music Store in Lafayette.
Landreth remembers a night years ago at Grant Street Dance House when an older musician told him, “‘If you were black or an older white blues musician, you’d be doing a lot better — meaning that my career as a professional musician would have taken off more. Well, I finally made it into the last category.”
More recently, aside from moving to Lafayette from his home of 40 years in Breaux Bridge, Landreth has also been busy making albums. In total, throughout his career he has made 12 albums.
“All in all, it’s been really good,” Landreth said, looking back over his career and considering the changes in the world of being a professional musician as technology evolved from analog to digital.
Landreth says he feels fortunate that he got in under the wire.
“Certainly, the entire nature of what it’s meant to make an album, to sign a deal with a label has changed. I had the chance to experience the contracts and deals with labels as it had been before — go on the road with a promo guy, go to every major city, go to the radio station and then do a gig that night,” Landreth said. “Now, that’s all changed.”
Landreth acknowledges the ways streaming music has affected royalties for artists and the process of recording an album.
He acknowledges it is not the first time the music business has changed.
“I ran into this back in the disco days — it was all about no live music,” Landreth said. “People eventually get tired of that. People want live music. As the CD steadily disappears, vinyl has come into its own again, ironically. In the vinyl, we have an insert, a card to download so that people can access our music digitally. In that regard, it gives an old analog dog like me hope.”
These days, for Landreth and his team, it’s all about selling albums and other merchandise at the gig.
“You have to roll with all the changes and get more creative,” he said. “Having said all of that, it’s still about the music and recording it and getting it out there. It’s interesting to watch how the change has happened and the industry is evolving. One thing, people still love to go out and get that connection with live music.”
Landreth will perform Thursday evening at the Manship Theater with an acoustic set followed by an electric set. He will also be performing on Nov. 11 at the Grand Opera House in Crowley.
He says some people “have been rocked to death,” and the acoustic music gives them the opportunity to “breath and build it up from there.”
Landreth’s “Blacktop Run” came out just before the COVID pandemic hit. He was three weeks into a coast-to-coast tour with his band and Marcia Ball when the world shut down and he came home. He says the lockdown provided a chance for rest unlike anything he has ever known.
“It was the first real break I had in all those years. I kept busy, did some livestreams, worked on other people’s albums, did a lot of videos,” he said. “We made the most of it.”
Even so, Landreth says he didn’t find the creative spurt brought on by the change of pace that many others did.
“With time, there’s only so many bottles of wine and episodes of Netflix you can take in,” he said. “I can entertain myself playing the guitar on the couch for a long time. It’s not the same as performing.”
Instead, he says the pandemic provided him an opportunity to hone his barista skills.
Currently, he is listening to an array of local artists including Michael Juan Nunez, Roddy Romero, Tommy McClain and Charles (C.C.) Adcock — musicians he enjoys and supports.
Landreth has played on a lot of albums, turning up in an extreme variety of musical genres, from providing the soundtrack for bar fight scenes in the movie “Roadhouse” (which he describes as a classic B-movie), to Alice Tatum, to Ann-Margret’s Christmas album, to work he has done with a French guitarist named Marc Aphlan, who claims Landreth as his mentor.