TRAVERSE CITY -- Ray Bonneville's music resides in an area between blues, folk, country and other roots music, a good place for someone who shares the name with a classic Pontiac sedan.
His strongest influence has been the blues, but he doesn't consider himself a blues musician as many people do, he said.
"I've stopped fighting the 'blues guy' term," said Bonneville, who will play three area shows this weekend.
"I'm a bluesy Americana writer," he added. "If somebody came to the show expecting traditional blues, they wouldn't get very much of it."
They would get Bonneville singing his original songs that helped him win a Juno award -- the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy -- and be nominated for two more, accompanied by his own percussion created by his foot tapping on a piece of plywood with its own microphone.
"It's not a new trick," he said. "People have being doing this for years and years and decades."
He got the idea when he played once on a porch that had a wooden floor.
"I heard the percussion of it," he said. "I was tapping without giving it a thought. I realized that it was really part of the music and that it helped the music quite a bit to hear it. It's like a drummer."
Bonneville was speaking by phone from Arkansas, where he has a cabin on the White River, which he said is a good fly-fishing spot. He also has an apartment in Austin, Texas and a trailer in Montreal, to be close to family.
Bonneville was born in Quebec City and his family moved to Boston when he was 12. He said that's where he really got into music, listening to blues masters like Lightning Hopkins, Son House and Etta James; as well as country greats like Hank Williams.
Bonneville, 60, has had the privilege of living in two of the great music cities: New Orleans and Austin.
The two towns offer different kinds of music. Yet both places have plenty of it to choose from every night of the week and one can't help absorbing it when living there.
While those are great places to listen, he said any location can be great to perform.
"It's about who comes to the show," he said. "It's not really about the geography."
Bonneville was strictly a live musician for the first part of his career and then took time off from that occupation to be a bush pilot from about 1979 to 1990.
"I scared myself really bad and then quit," he said. "I realized it was an extremely dangerous thing to do and then I went back to music."
Shortly after he traded the altimeter for a guitar, he started writing and recording his own songs. Up to that point, he had not felt confident enough in his English speaking to write songs, since he had spoken only French the first 12 years of his life while in Quebec.
"I was already singing in English and had no accent, and I was fine," he said. "But for writing in the language and doing poetry, I had to speak it as well as anyone to be able to do that."
Bonneville will perform at the InsideOut Gallery in Traverse City at 8 p.m. tonight. Tickets for that show will be $15 in advance and $20 at the door.
He will be at the Cabbage Shed in Elberta at 8 p.m. Saturday, and at the Beaver Island Cultural Center at 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
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