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As much as Blue Mother Tupelo performs in Blount County, you’d be hard-pressed to peg the band members as residents of Nashville.

From “The Shed” at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson a few months ago to the “Big BBQ Bash” a couple of weeks ago to Brackins Blues Club (where the band plays regularly) on Saturday night to the Back Hills Cafe on July 28 — the husband-wife duo of Ricky and Micol Davis have carved a niche for themselves as favorites of Blount County music lovers.

“We’re always meeting new people and making friends, and I just told Ricky the other day that I’m really thankful to play in Maryville,” Micol Davis told The Daily Times this week. “I’m thankful for people coming out to see us and that we can play so many different events there. Especially Brackins — we always have a good time there, and we’re thankful we don’t have to strictly do blues when we play there.”

“We like the fact that music lovers show up there to just listen and have a good time,” Ricky Davis added. “That’s our people — music lovers who appreciate all kinds of music.”

That’s a good thing for the Davises, considering the wealth of influences they bring to the table. A typical BMT show is the audio equivalent of going to a pizza place and asking the kid behind the counter to surprise you. You never know what you’ll be served, but you do know this — it’s pizza, so it’s going to be good. Blue Mother Tupelo works just like that — country, bluegrass, blues, swamp-rock ... it’s a grab-bag of rich, rootsy sounds, and it’s all good.

Ricky’s guitar work, whether he’s playing acoustic, electric or slide, channels the blues from the Mississippi Delta as much as it does the fleet-fingered picking styles of the Appalachian hills. With a sweet tenor, he’s a perfect compliment to his wife’s brazen, Bonnie Raitt-meets-Sheryl Crow vocals. At “The Shed” recently, the crowd was an enthusiastic mix of gyrating bikers, politely clapping seniors and kids jumping off the stage and dancing in unison at Micol’s feet.

“We’ve got so many influences it’s almost unbelievable: Definitely the late ‘60s psychedelic bluesy rock stuff; old blues stuff like Muddy Waters; Van Morrison,” Ricky Davis told us in an interview a couple of years ago. “The realness of the Mississippi sound, that Stax Records soulful sound, is really kind of right in the middle of where we come from, as well as old country stuff, like Hank Williams and Lefty Frisell. Any kind of music that’s got grit and soul appeals to us, whether it’s Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix to all points in between.”

Ricky and Micol Davis first met when the two — both Knoxville natives (Ricky graduated from Doyle and Micol went to Clinton) — ran into each other in Knoxville’s Old City, where Ricky was playing with another group. The couple moved to Nashville about five years ago to further their music career, a move that’s paying off despite the corporate climate of Music City.

“In the Nashville music business, you always get strong opinions from different people in the industry — people telling you that you ought to be doing this, that or the other,” Ricky Davis said. “We take it with a grain of salt, because primarily we listen to ourselves. We’ve been in Nashville for eight years now, and we’ve made friends with other songwriters in Nashville, and one of the reasons we’re such a tight-knit family is that we’ve been run through the ringer by the corporate mentality.

“I would love to see some changes made in that sort of thing, because there’s not very much stuff coming out of there that sounds like classic country. Things aren’t country, even though they want to call it that. There are a lot of songwriters in Nashville writing all kinds of music; that town is full of people who are virtually unknown, but they’re excellent. Every one should probably be household names.”

While major-label success and riches would be nice, that isn’t the goal for the Davises, however. More than anything, they want to continue making music and friends and spreading the love they feel for what they do. After six years, they’re close to wrapping up work on a new studio album (the follow-up to 2001’s “Delta Low, Mountain High”). Tentatively, it’s going to be called “Heaven and Earth,” and they hope to get it out by September.

“It really does seems slow-going at times, but it seems like that’s just sort of been the pattern for us,” Micol Davis said. “We’re always growing and learning, always meeting new people and making friends. Our audience is growing, and Ricky and I are getting stronger in a lot of ways too. We don’t worry too much and think too much about what we’re sounding like; more or less, if it sounds good to us, we just do it.

“I think our approach to the new recording right now is that it’s not going to be so diverse as far as stylistic stuff goes. We’re not going to have big horns on a song or stuff like that; it’s going to be scaled down instrumentally, and I think it’s going to be probably easier to categorize as far as more of a rootsy style rather than flirting with a little bit of everything.”

Despite the X-factors still to be worked out, fans can count on one thing — it will sound solid. It will be rootsy. It will be the next best thing to seeing Blue Mother Tupelo perform live.

“We’re always taking our music new places, and lately it’s just a feeling in our gut, knowing that we’ve kind of grown musically,” Ricky Davis said. “We’re really getting inside ourselves and getting our own sound out more and more and more. We just play what we play, and what we play is who we are.”