Murali Coryell sings with the grit and edge and soul of an aging bluesman. Not bad for a young man just starting his music career.

The 28-year-old Highland resident has found his niche in a music that carries a universal appeal, no matter who sings it.

"Muddy Waters recorded 20 years ago in this same space," says Coryell, looking around the Bearsville recording studio where Waters, one his blues mentors, recorded in the 1970s. "See, it all comes around again."

Coryell recently finished an album for Marshall Chess, President of Arc Music and heir to Chess Records, the blues bastion for artists like Etta James, Sunnyside Slim and Muddy Waters. Coryell is just one of thousands of people working to keep a music --- the roots for nearly everything we listen to today --- from extinction.

"The blues, the first time I heard it, it just spoke to me," Coryell says. "It's lessons and stories. That's why it's so popular, because it's so universal. The blues is life."

Music you can relate to

Musicians like W.C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Sonny Boy Williamson and Furry Lewis put faces and names to the 12-bar, bent-note melodies now known as the blues. But it was artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Koko Taylor and Stevie Ray Vaughan who popularized the sound, bringing it to radio and industry prominence.

"B.B. King was the first blues record I heard," says LaGrange bluesman Pat O'Shea, 28, leader of Pat O'Shea and the Eldorado Kings. "These guys weren't screaming about the devil and weren't wearing Spandex. They were just guys who love what they do. I could relate to that."

Now, it's the young artists who have the job of continuing the popularity and growth of the music.

While Coryell and O'Shea lead the local youth blues front, others like Jonny Lang, G. Love and Shemekia Copeland, daughter of the late Johnny "Clyde" Copeland, take their songs of heartbreak and loss and life to national audiences, looking for approval and listeners.

"Every hour of every day, someone is always playing the blues," says G. Love, a.k.a. Garrett Dutton, the 25-year-old "Philadelphonic Street Side" blues artist who recently signed to Epic Records. "You can't kill the blues. The blues is the music of the people."

For Howard Stovall, this music is a part of America's evolution and will continue to see growth and changes for years to come.

"The blues is at a peculiar point of transition now. It has a sociological and historical link to bluesmen who are now in their 70s," says Stovall, executive director of The Blues Foundation, the Memphis-based international organization created to preserve and promote the blues.

"Those bluesmen are now passing the torch, so to speak. The music is new and turning a corner to popularity. It's now seen as a historical treasure." The Blues Foundation, which is the governing body of more than 70 blues societies in 12 countries around the world and sponsors the annual W.C. Handy Awards (the Grammys of the blues industry), is the only group in the blues world that serves fans and attempts to protect artists.

Stovall attributes the newfound popularity of the music to artists in the rock world.

"Rock 'n' rollers are now pointing to this music as key to what they do," Stovall says.

Rockers like Eric Clapton, who had his longtime idol, "Gatemouth" Brown, take the stage with him a few years ago so the bluesman could share his Texas-style finger picking with the sold-out crowd.

"It's taken people a long time to figure out what's up," Brown says from his Slidell, La., home. "But sooner or later, they realize the blues is where it all comes from."

An enduring sound

It's the strength and the power of the blues, however, that Stovall believes has carried it all these years and will allow it to last and thrive in years to come.

"It's a music about moving from darkness to light and it's always had everything going against it," he says. "It will endure." For Bruce Iglauer, it was Stevie Ray Vaughan who helped attract young people to the blues and helped jump start the music again in numerous circles.

"Blues has become part of the musical vocabulary of most Americans and that wasn't the case four or five years ago," says Iglauer, who points directly to Vaughan for some of this popularity. "He had a lot to do with attracting young listeners."