Cover photo © 2026 Kelly Ralph

You want blues bona fides? Roy Rogers was the right-hand man to John Lee Hooker. He’s played extensively with fellow slide guitar ace Bonnie Raitt. His Delta Rhythm Kings band has been a going concern for over four decades. He could have ridden off on Trigger into the sunset already (oh, wrong Roy Rogers). He has not. Rogers has released his first new album in a decade, The Sky’s The Limit, a strong collection of songs he has been collecting for over five years. He’s hitting the road with trio and solo shows in the western U.S. this year because that’s what he does. His playing crackles and elicits nostalgic feelings while still being fresh and in your face. He’s razor sharp and shows no signs of stopping at age 75.

To understand how he got to elder blues statesman status, perhaps we should go back to the beginning. Roy Rogers was born in Redding, California in 1950 and grew up in a musical household.

“My mother was a great pianist, wonderful, she had a great left hand. She played those great standards from the 30s and 40s when I was growing up. That’s the first musical memory I can recall. She could get very emotional when she played certain tunes. As a kid that struck me early on, that music could move you. Happy or sad, I got that from music at a very early age. That was a very important factor certainly,” Rogers said.

Yes, his parents named after the singing cowboy. Yes, he was teased by the other kids.

“To say the least. I did not wear cowboy boots. It’s worked to my advantage with my sense of humor, don’t take your stuff too seriously,” Rogers said. “It wasn’t the cowboy’s real name. His real name was Leonard Slye. I’d tell people, if there’s any confusion here, I’m the real Roy Rogers! I was nominated for a GRAMMY the same year as Roy the cowboy. I believe ’91, he was nominated with Clint Black. It was in New York. He was there with his son Dusty. I’d met him a few times before, but had an extensive conversation there, he was in his 80s. I have this great picture on my wall with his arm around me and I’m grinning ear to ear. The fact that two Roy Rogers were nominated the same year, the odds were a zillion to one.”

As a youngster, listening to records would be Rogers’ education. He relished collecting 45s, a collection he still has. Soul star Gary U.S. Bonds was a particular favorite. Rogers started playing guitar at age 12 and it didn’t take the prodigy very long to hit the stage.

“My older brother (Bill) brought home The King of the Delta Blues, the Columbia release when they released the Robert Johnson stuff. I really got into slide when I heard Robert Johnson, for sure. I had heard Muddy Waters before, but it was really the Robert Johnson record when I was 14. I was in bands at 13, but I wasn’t playing slide. I was playing Chuck Berry and B.B. King riffs. Then I got into Robert Nighthawk, all the blues guys, Elmore James, Wolf. I got to see a lot of the cats at the Fillmore as a teenager.”

Mastering the slide would be a calling card for Rogers and part of his sound.

“I think slide is one of the most evocative ways you can play guitar because it’s mimicking the human voice. That’s why those Mississippi guys would sing half a verse and then they’d split it with guitar and come back with the voice and it was interchangeable. That was very cool. Son House, guys like that, up to guys like Duane Allman. They were saying something. That’s the important thing. What are you saying?”

Living in Northern California in the 1960s was fortuitous timing for Rogers, as a wave of the original electric blues stars would start to tour and relocate from the hotbeds like Chicago to California. As a teenager, Rogers was in the audience for some seminal blues moments.

“Certainly, number one would be at the Avalon Ballroom, which would be Howlin’ Wolf. Stunning, absolutely stunning. I had no idea what he did on stage, you had to see him live. He was crawling around on stage, messing with the microphone, he’d put the whole harmonica in his mouth. Just a powerful guy. I saw B.B. King when he first played the Fillmore and he played my hometown Vallejo two weeks prior at the local Vets Hall. John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed. The irony for me is 20-some-odd years later, I’m working with John Lee and opening shows for B.B. and met a lot of them. I got to play with some of these cats. Full circle. Nice work if you can get it.”

He’d get a lot of work. In the 70s he played in an acoustic duo called Rogers and Burgin. In 1980, at age 30, he struck out as the bandleader of the Delta Rhythm Kings. 46 years later, they’re still cookin’.

“It’s been a pretty consistent lineup, but I have had different lineups over the years,” Rogers said. “My current bass player, Steve Ehrmann, has been with me a great many years. He was there at the beginning, then he left, I had another guy Steve Evans play bass for some years and toured a lot, then Steve Ehrmann came back. My current drummer Kevin Hayes obviously played with Robert Cray for many years. I’ve pretty much always blown a trio. A couple of exceptions, my dear friend, Phil Aaberg, who just left the planet, he joined me on keyboards. Incredible keyboardist, he played on a lot of my records. When you have a power trio, you can go a lot of different directions. It’s mainly blues, but there are a lot of elements that come into my playing. I don’t consider myself a traditional guy. I’m messing with it. I’ve had the good fortune to make recordings with Ray Manzarek, Norton Buffalo, with Bonnie and so forth. But live performance with the trio is what I enjoy the best. It’s the live show. You should be better live. It’s constantly a reinterpretation.”

Playing with the legendary John Lee Hooker would become a major career highlight and provide Rogers with great exposure.

“John Lee was a wonderful human being. When I first started with him in ’82, I actually took the place of a B3 organ player. I was the rhythm guitar player and I was happy with that. There was a lead guitar player in the band, Mike Osborn. A lot of times when Hooker would play, he’d being doing this rhythm and sometimes just stop and start singing, well I was there to pick up the rhythm. I was steeped in John Lee Hooker music and his whole groove thing which was deep, to say the least, not just the boogie. When you do a swing, it’s gotta be deep, not superficial. I established a really close relationship with John musically. Then friendship-wise, that’s why I was asked by John and his manager Mike Kappus from Rosebud. They asked me if I wanted to produce him. I was totally confident to do that for The Healer, which was a joy to do, and then we did three others after that. I’m happy to say that John had the confidence in me to do that. We had a lot of famous people sit in. It wasn’t about the famous person sitting in. It was about how it meshed-up with John Lee Hooker, period. That was the emphasis. With those parameters, we made some good records. Certainly, John was happy and we won a couple GRAMMYs along the way for him.”

Those records featured an absolute who’s who of stars, including Carlos Santana, Van Morrison, Los Lobos, Jimmy Vaughan, Charlie Musselwhite, George Thorogood, Johnny Winter, Albert Collins, Johnnie Johnson, Booker T. Jones, Jim Keltner, and many others. Roy had Hooker’s trust to manage the situation.

“My relationship with John was closer than close. I started doing business for him on the road, paying the band, and I was in the band. I was playing with him for four years, from ’82 to ’86. Then I started opening the shows, so he had a built-in opening act. I used the bass and drums. That’s great for the show, you don’t need to find an opening act. So that put my name out there and helped me start solo touring. My wife Gaynell just wrote a cookbook and a memoir (Down Home Cooking from a Wayward Southern Belle) and she related a meal she cooked at John Lee’s birthday party at our house in San Francisco and he’d come up and get a peach pie. We were close, it was like family. I’m delighted to have been a part of it. When John Lee did it, I don’t care if it was Keith Richards or (Robert) Cray or Bonnie or whomever, he was happy and he was up for it. I just helped put the pieces together.”

After his time with Hooker, Rogers spent significant time playing with Bonnie Raitt, an artist he also holds in high regard.

“She’s so open to how her band is performing live and so great with that wonderful voice of hers and she’s so lyrical playing, so moving. Her vibrato, a different style completely from mine. She moves people. She is a performer that’s been doing it a long time. Whether it’s big crowd or small crowd, it’s her crowd. She knows how to communicate in a way that people feel at ease and open for her music. Not everyone can do that. She listens to her band. She’s a consummate player. Every time we get together, we trade riffs. It’s a conversation and a very enjoyable one.”

When he wasn’t helping some of the biggest blues stars of our time, he was out on the road with the Delta Rhythm Kings, including serving as opening act on a tour for a Mount Rushmore blues player, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

“I did a tour with Stevie Ray about six months before he passed away. Great tour, it was great opening for Stevie Ray. What can we say, those special players don’t come around that often. That’s the great thing about these guys. You’re always going to borrow from the people that you listen to. He would just keep playing at soundchecks. He was that driven. He loved playing. It was wonderful to see a guy like that. He had such power. Gone too soon.”

Rogers has indeed borrowed from the greats to create his own indelible sound. You can hear country, Delta blues, blues rock, roots music, pop, and more in his songs.

“It’s all in the mix. I listen to everything. I love the earlier country music. It’s based on that early Mississippi stuff. I love The Temptations, jazz, Ben Webster, swing jazz. My mother had the John Hammond multi-record set From Spirituals to Swing and that was playing around the house. Count Basie. Big Bill Broonzy. The blues is a wide swath for me. Hooker said it best, ‘the blues is a feeling.’”

Reaction has been positive to the new album, The Sky’s The Limit.

“I started writing it during COVID. I don’t tour as often as a lot of people, by choice,” Rogers said. “I wanted to have songs that were self-penned. I gave it a lot of thought as to how I wanted to approach that one. I have one cover. I was a big fan of the Rolling Stones, so I included that (‘The Last Time’). It was just time to say hey, I’m here, I’m not doing as much, but I’m still hopefully a viable musician. I’m not trying to prove anything other than write some good songs. I’m 75 years old, so I started with ‘Those Bygone Days’ and there are a lot of bygone days. You start to get older, it gives you a lot of perspective on things.”

The reality of America in 2026 had Rogers also stepping out on a new limb on the album.

“I couldn’t resist the political overtone of ‘He’s a Legend’ because we live in strange times. I’m don’t get real political, but I had to just say something. I think you can say it with humor than just attacking someone, that’s my style. It led to me exploring some new territory, writing-wise.”

Writing and recording aside, you can tell that Rogers revels in art of actual live performance and trying to transform an audience.

“It’s a gift that you can hear in a lot of different cultures, you have to be open to it,” Rogers said. “The performance is what moves us. When a performer has that kind of power, they don’t even think about it, they just do it. It doesn’t work like that, they are that. Hooker was like that, he lived and breathed it. That’s what we aspire to in playing. We can all play hot licks and speed it up, but does it mean something?”

So, he’ll be out there. He may not be out there for 200 shows a year or crisscrossing the country, but he’ll be out there, looking for that connection. Roy is joined in that journey by his wife, Gaynell Rogers, who is a longtime manager and publicist. As mentioned early, she is also an expert cook and now author. Gaynell will join Roy’s solo shows this summer to share stories from the book about dinner with Taj Mahal, Raitt, Wynton Marsalis, Big Mama Thornton, and others.

As he sings in the bittersweet Stones cover at the end of the new album, “this may be the last time, I don’t know.” We certainly hope there are many miles to go for this blues treasure.