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Thirteen years is a long time for any band, much less one that’s endured as much toil and strife as the guys in Slow Blind Hill have.

When it comes down to it, though, the music reigns supreme — it’s the balm that soothes the savaged soul, both for the guys playing it and the audience members listening to it.

“We’ve probably been around so long just because we enjoy the music so much,” guitarist/vocalist Jaime Cameron told The Daily Times this week. “We enjoy playing together so much. Eddie (Roberts, the band’s bassist and keyboard player) have known each other 30-something years, and we’ve worked on and off together so long that at this point, it’s like we’re telepathic, almost.

“He knows what I’m going to do, and I know what he’s going to do, and we make it happen together. We just enjoy the music, and we try to capture the moment every time we play.”

Nowhere is that more evident than on “Jump In Deep,” the band’s most recent album. It’s a record that captures Slow Blind Hill in a way that hasn’t been done before — loose and groove-oriented, yet instrumentally tight and vocally sound. It’s a collection of tracks about as improvisational as you can get within the studio setting, and it showcases a quartet of guys who may not have the flashy tricks or the play-hard/party-hard mentality of younger bands, but they make up for it where it matters most — style and substance.

In other words, Slow Blind Hill is a cask of aged liquor, subtle and succinct on the tongue and packing a helluva wallop going down the gut.

“When our trumpet player (Charlie Box) died (in 2003) the day we released the ‘You Need to Come Back’ CD, we couldn’t find a trumpet player to fill in, so Henry Perry came along and was eager to play harmonica for us,” Cameron said. “Eddie was more interested in playing the Hammond B-3 organ, so it sort of transformed into an organ trio kind of thing, augmented by the harmonica. Now, I believe our live performances are pretty organ intensive. Eddie is playing both bass and organ, and as long as his right hand knows what his left is doing, we’re pretty tight from the get-go.

“I think it’s gotten to be more of a groove kind of thing than it was. Now, the organ and the drummer get in the pocket, and a lot of it is more of a groove kind of feel that’s making it work for us. We don’t really have any setlists that we play; we try to read the room and see what people are responding to and just go in that direction. We’ll try this thing or that thing and just see what seems to be working and then try to push it.”

Slow Blind Hill has been playing around Knoxville since 1994, and Box added a jazzy element to the band when he joined in January 2002, making Slow Blind Hill a little more versatile than other blues groups in the area. The band released two albums, “Old Enough to Know Better,” a record of 13 originals, and “Live at The Baker-Peters House,” a CD of 14 cover songs and one original recorded live.
The group combines everything from Louis Jordan, B.B. King, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and even Bootsy Collins for a sound that can range from slow and sultry to rocking and smoking, all in a single set. The band prides itself on setting a certain mood and settling in for a night at a club like Brackins Blues Bar in downtown Maryville, where Slow Blind Hill performs Saturday, and then riding that mood like a quartet of ringmasters under a vaudevillian big top.

“We’ve probably been over at Brackins about 10 times, and it’s more of a serious blues kind of place,” Cameron said. “The people that go there are knowledgeable about the blues and have a good feel for it. The room has changed some over a period of time — they’ve made architectural changes to it — but every time we play over there, the crowd is real receptive and wants to dance.”

Dancing, of course, is optional — and the easily embarrassed might want to stay seated on Saturday night. One never knows when Cameron and his bandmates will be scoping the crowd for potential lyrical material, as they did for “Jump In Deep.”

“Those songs came about in a way that a lot of them were almost written on stage,” Cameron said. “For the lead track, we got into a groove one Friday night and made up the lyrics on the spot, and it seemed to go over pretty good. For ‘Saturday Night at the Dance Club,’ we were playing at Baker-Peters and just started describing the room and the people sitting in there listening to us.

“A lot of it is pretty spontaneous in that sense. The feel of the moment is what prompts the lyrical content and the leaning of the songs.”