March 10, 2008 | If you want to follow the career of writer-director John Sayles, you have to cover a lot of ground.

Ever since the release of his debut feature – Return of the Secaucus 7, the 1980 comedy-drama about former ‘60s radicals that launched him as a founding father of American independent cinema -- the Schenectady, N.Y.-born auteur has taken audiences everywhere from the mean streets of ‘80s Harlem (The Brother from Another Planet, 1984) to the coal fields of ‘20s West Virginia (Matewan, 1987), from the Cajun country of Louisiana (Passion Fish, 1992) to a fishing village in Ireland (The Secret of Roan Inish, 1994), from the Tex-Mex border (Lone Star, 1996) to the Alaskan wilds (Limbo, 1999), from steamy coastal Florida (Sunshine State, 2002) to politically contentious Colorado (Silver City, 2004).

Now Sayles wants to carry us along the back roads of 1950 Alabama in Honeydripper, a seriocomic fable about a small-town African-American businessman (Danny Glover at his finest) who’s desperate to draw crowds to his failing juke joint. What he needs is a miracle to compete with another local night spot. What he gets is an itinerant young musician (Gary Clark) who’s willing to pose as the living-legendary Guitar Slim, the real-life performer who helped bridge the gap between gospel-flavored blues and shout-out rock ’n’ roll.

Q: OK, I have to ask: How did a lanky white boy from the wilds of Schenectady get into the Southern blues and gospel music of the 1950s?

A: [Laughs] You know, it’s interesting. I was born in 1950. And while growing up, I listened to a lot of Top 40 radio. And I could pick up little hints of this music – in Ray Charles, little hints of blues and gospel. And in Sam Cooke, too. But also, we had relatives in the South. And we used to drive down old Route 1 before there was the Interstate. And the radio got a lot more, well, interesting south of Baltimore. For about fifty miles – maybe a hundred at the most – you’d get some of these local stations. And you’d hear guys preaching, and you’d hear really raw gospel, really raw blues, really raw country stuff that didn’t get played on WTRY in the Schenectady-Albany-Troy area back in New York. But then, after you’d drive a while, they’d be gone. So there was something kind of ghostly about it. Like it only existed in that air there.

Q: And how did you follow up on that first taste of the stuff?

A: When I was 15 or 16, I started searching out stuff that was not necessarily on the radio. And that’s when I discovered, “Oh, there’s this gospel and blues stuff,” which is where rock ‘n’ roll came from, recorded before I was born. But I’ll tell you: I think I was in my early 30s before I started hearing Louis Jordan, or early rhythm and blues. Just as the Korean War is kind of “The Forgotten War,” I think there’s a whole era – seven or eight years, in between the swing era and what we think of as the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll – that’s just forgotten. Even the oldies stations don’t go that far back. They don’t have Ivory Joe Hunter and Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown, all these great honkers and shouters.

Q: So how did you channel all of this into a screenplay?

A: I drew from a short story I wrote in 1993 called “Keeping Time,” about a 40-year-old drummer in a 20-year-old band. And in the course of that story, he runs into this old man who’s a janitor, whose fingers are all crippled with arthritis. And he says: “You couldn’t tell to look at me now, but I used to be one of the original Guitar Slims.” And that came to me just from hearing all these stories about how the real Guitar Slim was this early player in New Orleans who was famous for two things. One was having the long extension cord on his guitar. You see, in New Orleans, you could have six clubs on one street. And he would just take the extension cord, and go to the doorways of the other clubs, and play until he got some people following him, so he could do the whole Pied Piper thing back into his own club.

Q: And the other thing he was famous for?

A: Well, he was famous was not showing up every once in a while. He was sort of like the George Jones of early rhythm and blues. So other guys had to stand in for him. Earl King kind of made a career out of this. But also a lot of other guys who were young men then, and later became icons of R&B guitar -– at some point in their young lives they were told by a club owner, “Nobody knows what this guy looks like outside of New Orleans. So tonight, you are Guitar Slim.”

Q: You’ve been directing independent movies for nearly three decades. Do you still get excited about your work? Do you still feel butterflies in your stomach on the first day of shooting?

A: Oh, yeah. But unfortunately, after all this time, we’re still spending 90 percent of our time either doing publicity for the movie to support it after it comes out, or doing all the things we do to make money. Which, in the case of this movie, was me writing lots of lots of screenplays for other people. The five weeks of actual shooting were really exciting. They were a laugh a minute. Because, you know, if you only have five weeks to shoot this ambitious a movie, you’re shooting about four pages a day. But the time we spend chasing the ability to make an independent movie is enormous compared to the time you spend actually making the movie.