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He could easily pass for a character in one of his own songs — a small-town boy from North Carolina, apparently destined for a career working in the mills, who discovers the transformative power of music.

A late bloomer when it comes to rock 'n' roll, he discovers Bob Dylan at 18, gets around to listening to Willie Nelson a few years later and is turned on to Van Morrison just last year. Armed with a guitar and a dream, he migrates to East Tennessee and begins pulling himself up the rocky face of the local music scene, one gig at a time.

It would make a great song, but it makes an even better story because it's all true. Sam Lewis is that small-town boy, from Asheboro, N.C., who first came to Knoxville in October 2005.

"At the time, a lot of my friends were graduating from college, but I didn't go," Lewis told The Daily Times this week. "I jumped right into mill work and that kind of stuff; growing up I had a lot of goals and dreams, but like a lot of everybody else's, they got tossed to the side. I always kept my nose clean and kept out of trouble, and I've always been work-oriented; if I had a job, I'd take it serious, whether it's flipping burgers or working in a doctor's office (which is what he does now)."

But at night, when the Piedmont breezes blew down from the mountains to the west, Lewis couldn't help but think that maybe he was meant for something more. He'd had a guitar since he was 12, but when he pulled it out and dusted it off after several years, it hummed in his hands in a way it never had before.

Call it the siren song of music, or the seductive pull of the open road on the heart of a troubadour. Whatever it was, Lewis packed up and headed to Knoxville. He had been dabbling in songwriting for several months, having taught himself to play Dylan tunes and getting into Willie Nelson via the latter's "Live at Billy Bob's" album.

"We started hanging out practically religiously, and I found out about a lot of things through him," Lewis said of his friend. "I discovered Dylan when I was 18 and picked my guitar up and learned some of his songs — easy licks and fun, sing-along songs. We'd play and just have fun and listen to tunes, but that really got the ball rolling as far as what I was missing out on. I mean, I knew who Willie Nelson was, but I had never really listened to him until he game me that album.

"He also gave me a Leon Russell album, and I started listening to this and that and everything in between. We got to the point where, ever night, we were sitting around playing songs, and eventually he said, 'To hell with this; let's write our own songs.' To this day, I don't know if he was serious or not, but I said, 'What the hell; I guess I can be creative.'"

It wasn't long before songs started pouring out of him. He admits he had no idea how the songwriting process worked; he usually started with a good melody and went anywhere from there that his muse took him. Choosing Knoxville was another random stroke of luck — he thought the local music scene would be accommodating, and he was right. At first, he got started locally playing free shows at coffeehouses like The Lost Savant, on Broadway in Knoxville.

"I decided to move in with some friends over here in 2005, mostly because I thought there was a decent little music scene here, and I wanted to get involved," he said. "It was a place to make a fresh start with a clean slate, and when Roger over at The Lost Savant asked me to play, I knew 10 songs by different artists and six of my own that I had written.

"But that was a good place to try stuff out and get used to that sort of thing. I had never played on a PA before, or even in front of people other than my friends. But I started picking up gigs here and there and meeting people. I kept writing songs, and people kept coming."

From there, he springboarded into various open-mic nights (including one stint at Brackins Blues Bar in downtown Maryville, where he sat in with Tuesday night regular Scott McMahan). He got serious about guitar-playing and taught himself to play harmonica as well, and last summer, he took a step back and realized that playing music was where his heart was at.

After making friends with the duo known as Medford's Black Record Collection, Lewis got invited to record in their home studio. He's currently working on his debut album, and has roughly 19 songs recorded for the project.

"The first time I really recorded anything, my main goal was just to get them copyrighted," Lewis said. "But in trying some songs out, they actually turned out pretty good. It went well, and about 11 of those 19 songs were done in one take. These days, it's so easy to make a CD, I just decided to go ahead with it."

His music is straightforward singer-songwriter folk — a guitar, Lewis's world-weary tenor and a batch of songs that show off his influences but are original in their own right. He's still honing his chops and finding his niche, and slowly but surely, he's winning over locals.

It hasn't been easy, but he's been willing to put forth the effort. And most of the time, it pays off.

"This past summer, I picked up a join called Smokey's, over off Broadway near Interstate 640," he said. "I'd say if any place was a place to start really playing, that would be it. That was a hard place — nothing but regulars, and if I wasn't playing, they were all about some AC/DC or some Marshall Tucker, and that stuff's cool. I mean, I grew up on Skynyrd, and I didn't want to play it, because I thought everybody had heard it enough.

"But they really seemed to like me. I played there off-and-on through Dec. 1, and by the end, I was drawing a pretty good crowd. It was just awesome."