Austin bluesman Black Joe Lewis found voice in primal scream

Joe Lewis describes The Honeybears sound as "blues with a horn section, which is basically rock and roll."

Joe Lewis is living testimony to the fact that you can dramatically alter your life at any time, even on a whim.

It was not quite a decade ago that Lewis, 30, was working in an Austin, Texas-area pawnshop, when the longtime music fan decided to make a drastic change.

"There's a lot of downtime in a pawn shop, and I used to play around with all the merchandise," Lewis recalls. "I would just grab the really good guitars and tinker around on them, and then one day I just ended up buying one. I was like, 'Why don't I actually try to learn how to play this?'"

That decision set Lewis down an unlikely path that has led to his band, Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, being one of the hottest bands on the always-competitive Austin scene. The band, which performs on Valentine's Day at the Hi-Tone Café, has been acclaimed for its raw, rocking "garage soul" and in particular for the magnetic presence and powerful wail of its frontman.

Lewis' unique style, often described as a mix of Howlin' Wolf and James Brown, was apparent from the start. With little patience for rehearsal, much less woodshedding to build up his musical chops, Lewis jumped almost immediately into playing live, learning how to express himself as he went.

"Because I was older and didn't know how to play, I just kind of had to guess and improvise a lot," he says. While not great at building technical proficiency, his learning process did help him develop a bluesy, dirty sound, rooted in the Jimi Hendrix and grunge he was listening to at the time, that was uniquely his own. "I know guys who can shred and all that, but the sound doesn't have any character. I think that's more important."

It took longer for Lewis to develop as a singer. In his first few bands, he was a reluctant vocalist. Then, one day he watched a Brown documentary before a Mardi Gras gig in Lafayette, La.

"(The movie) got me all pumped up, and I was like, 'I'm just going to scream!'" he says of his primal wail. "Once I started screaming, I was way better. For a while, I just screamed, and after awhile, I learned to turn it into a voice."

After a succession of bands, The Honeybears were formed in 2007 when Lewis met guitarist Zach Ernst. The key to the new combo was the addition of sophisticated horns to Lewis' raw blues songwriting.

"I think that's what gave us a sound," Lewis says. "We're not so much a soul band as people say. We're pretty much just playing blues with a horn section, which is basically rock and roll."

After a few years spent opening for the likes of Spoon and Okkervil River, The Honeybears broke out in 2009, when the band was pegged by Esquire magazine as one of "Ten Bands Set to Break Out at 2009's SXSW Festival." At the exact same time, roots label Lost Highway released the band's acclaimed full-length debut, Tell 'Em What Your Name Is!, produced by Spoon drummer Jim Eno.

Reteaming with Eno, the band released last spring its follow-up, Scandalous. The new effort is even grittier than the first, with a new focus on the down-and-dirty guitar work of Lewis and Ernst amid the Fat Possum-inspired grooves and Stax-style horn flourishes.

The release of Scandalous seems to have assured the band's place among a new crop of artists — including The Black Keys, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and even chart-topper Adele — who nurture a sound that conjures the classic R&B of the '60s and '70s.

"I've never really thought of ourselves as part of that," Lewis says, before coming around to the comparison. "We're just kind of a blues-funk band that added horns to it. The Dap-Kings are completely different. They've got that smooth thing going, and I feel like we rock out a bit more. But it's like the kids who are dressing up like the '80s these days. It's the same thing with music. The old stuff comes in. And why not? The new stuff is garbage. Those are the people who did it best."

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears

Tuesday at the Hi-Tone Café, 1913 Poplar Ave. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission: $10; advance tickets available at hitonememphis.com. For more information, call (901) 278-8663.

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