news-record.com

GREENSBORO - A minister who once acted as the unofficial chaplain for the blues scene along the Texas Gulf Coast won the Triad's amateur blues contest Sunday night.

Landon Spradlin beat out five other bands in the 21st annual contest sponsored by the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society. The band will now got a chance to travel to Memphis, Tenn., to compete in one of the world's biggest blues competition.

Spradlin's four-member band will compete in the International Blues Competition and get a slot in the society's Carolina Blues Festival that'll take place next spring in downtown Greensboro.

His band, appropriately called the Landon Spradlin Band, won Sunday night with a three-song set that featured Howlin' Wolf's "300 Pounds of Joy,'' an original, "Without You'' and Keb Mo's "She Just Wants To Dance.''

Part of it was the band's talent, a classic drums-bass-keyboard makeup. For the past six months, the band has practiced in Spradlin's storefront church, beside Western Auto, along Main Street in Gretna, Va.

But mostly, it was Spradlin.

He's 54, a father of five, who has a bar-raspy baritone like Delbert McClinton. He plays guitar and banters comfortably from the stage - enough to coax eight couples on a small dance floor during his set at Greensboro's Zion Bar & Grille.

Spradlin, once called a "good party guy" by his friends, has been a minister since 1980. He's ministered along Bourbon Street in New Orleans as well as Fort Worth, Texas, where he officiated the funerals for area bluesman.

In January 2007, he came back to southwest Virginia and started a non-denominational church called The Move in Gretna, a small working-class town about two hours north from Greensboro on U.S. 29.

It's the very area where he grew up as the son of a longtime teacher at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Va.

There, in southwest Virginia, he discovered the blues as a boy by looking at the back of a Rolling Stones' record album and wondering what the tune "Little Red Rooster'' was all about.

"I really had to seek it out because Pittsylvania County is not a blues mecca,'' Spradlin said Sunday night minutes after getting the news. "But blues has always been my passion. Everything that plays from my heart is in a blues form."