Thanks to his godfather, Jocco Rushing is a guitar player and founder of Fried Chicken & Gasoline.

His godfather is bluesman Kenny Brown, who started the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic in Potts Camp, Miss. Rushing, 20, and his band are among performers slated to appear at this year's two-day festival that begins today.

"Kenny gave me a guitar when I was about seven years old," said Rushing, a native Memphian now living in Vancleave, Miss. "He said, 'One day you might be able to play it. Maybe you won't.' I set it in the closet for, shoot, a long time."

When Rushing turned 15 he told Brown, "Kenny, I'm gonna give you this guitar back. I ain't gonna be able to play it, man.'"

But Brown said, "Why don't you hang on to that a little bit longer?"

A month later Rushing told Brown, "If you're gonna make me keep it, you might as well show me a lick on it or so.'"

Brown began teaching him guitar chords. "I had an old 33 rpm record player, and Kenny and I got about 10,000 records. I just go through there and, man, I'd just play. I learned from the same people Kenny learned from -- Joe Callicott, Johnny Woods, R. L. Burnside. I always had blues roots."

Brown says on his MySpace page that as a 10-year-old, he learned to play guitar from his neighbor, Mississippi Joe Callicott, and Callicott is a favorite of Rushing's. "I burned up three of his records listening to them going to sleep."

Rushing never met Callicott, but he claims his music as an influence: "You know when you sit out there in the middle of the night? It's dark. You sit on the porch. That's when you think you would hear him sitting there picking on that old flat top. That's where he recorded that stuff. On the porch. In the kitchen. It sounded like that was how it was supposed to sound."

Rushing lived in Potts Camp with Brown when he formed the first Fried Chicken and Gasoline band. "A buddy who lived across the hill from me played guitar. The boy's name was Angus Oswald. His daddy named him after AC/DC's Angus Young. I thought that was just cool."

Their band name came from a movie. "Me and Angus were sitting up in his room one night watching 'House of 1,000 Corpses,' a Rob Zombie movie. A little sign in front of a gasoline station says 'Fried Chicken and Gasoline.'"

Their first gig was playing some Metallica music and "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)" at a high school talent show. "We won the talent show."

Rushing played on the cheap Tesco Del Ray guitar Brown had given him until he was 16, and Brown gave him his blue Stratocaster. "After that, I played off an old box Spitfire '70s model. I found it in a box in Kenny's house. It was in 60,000 different pieces. I rebuilt it, and now I play it."

Brown also gave him Johnny Woods' hat. "They said when he died, part of him went into me."

Rushing performed on stage with Brown in Norway, Sweden and Denmark when he was 16. "I played over there a year after I started playing. I'm pretty sure it was horrible, but everybody seemed to dig it."

He left Potts Camp and moved to Vancleave when he was still in high school. "I got into some trouble in North Mississippi. When all you got is gravel roads and alcohol, it's usually time to move away. It really wasn't nothing. I wasn't doing too good in school."

Rushing played center on the football team at Vancleave High School. "I was all right. I was never very good at football. It was a cool place to have a few friends. I found out here was this little fellow that lived around the corner from me that played bluegrass -- A.J. Wise."

After Rushing moved, he formed a new Fried Chicken & Gasoline with Wise and his brother, bassist Ethan Wise, and drummer Lynn Smith.

A.J., 18, writes the lyrics to most of their songs, including "Gypsy Lady." The song is about "those kind of women you like a lot," A.J. said. "They're wonderful. They're great. But they ain't good for you, man. The kind of woman everybody wants, but nobody needs."

Rushing wrote "First Night of Forever" after returning from a music convention in Nashville. "I ended up having one of those crazy fall-in-love-through-the-weekend things," he said. "I wrote a song about her."

"Slow rock" is what some people call their music. "We call it baby-making music. I like to incorporate a lot of my hill country stuff in there. A lot of Burnside stuff. A lot of Kenny's stuff, too.

"I try to keep it close. Before too long it's all gonna be gone. If it ain't for us keeping it up, it's gonna go away."

Listen Up spotlights area performers. Michael Donahue can be reached at 529-2797.

Fried Chicken & Gasoline

2 p.m. Saturday at the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic in Potts Camp, Miss. Admission is $10 today, $25 Saturday and $30 for both days. Go to nmshillcountrypicnic.com or myspace.com/northmississippihillcountrypicnic.