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Once Bruce Millard got off the beaten path of traditional popular music, he never quite made his way back onto it.

It's not that he's lost -- he's just content to explore the landscape on his own, or rather with a little help from his friends and bandmates in Hokum's Heroes. What he's found is a rich musical tapestry with roots in a number of American art forms, and tonight at the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center in Townsend, he and his colleagues will showcase a few of them.

"It was several years ago, and I was playing electric guitar in some fairly middle-of-the-road rock and rhythm-and-blues bands up in Boston that I was really happy to be in," Millard told The Daily Times this week. "My girlfriend bought me a mandolin for my birthday because I'd had one that had been stolen years ago, and my friend Michael Tarbox (who would go on to front the Tarbox Ramblers) asked me to play mandolin in his band.

"At the time, he had a band that was really balancing the fine line between old string band music and the Delta blues; he had a fiddle player as a counterpoint to his cranked-out, Hounddog Taylor-style guitar. We had a lot of fun and played a lot around Boston, and that familiarized me with that older music. I had been aware of it, but I wasn't listening to it as a daily diet."

Fate, it seemed, was determined to keep Millard on the roots music road -- a chance encounter with Jim Kweskin led to a joint venture, and from that group, Millard and a few other of Kweskin's backing musicians fell in with African-American stringband legend Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong.

"He and his wife, Barbara, were looking for some musicians to join their backing band, so some of us went over and auditioned," Millard said. "After I took that detour, I never made it back to the main road, and I've been playing that style of music ever since."

"That style" is a cross-pollination of modern sensibilities and roots-music traditions highlighted by a few rock 'n' roll flourishes. Millard and his bandmates learned a great deal from their time with Armstrong, but in Hokum's Heroes, they remain committed to establishing a separate identity -- one that pays homage to the past while acknowledging the present as well.

"The players we have in this band are not all coming from the same tradition as Howard, and it's counterproductive to try to squeeze everyone into that," he said. "By letting everyone be themselves, we're getting a really broad section of music that encompasses rock and a lot more. We play the songs he played, and we try to keep the same spirit, but we don't suppress the fact that we grew up listening to the Beatles and things like that.

"As a kid, when I heard the Rolling Stones, that led me back to listening to Robert Johnson, through Howlin' Wolf. It's more easily digestible if you go one step back at a time than springing a 1928 recording on someone right off the bat."

Tonight's show is a stop on the band's way to Caryville, where Hokum's Heroes will perform as part of the Louie Bluie Festival -- a tribute to Armstrong and the influence of his music. Hokum's Heroes first came down from Boston in 2005 to perform in Campbell County, at what was then known as the LaFollette Rendezvous. After taking a year off to work out the kinks, the festival was back on in 2007, and Hokum's Heroes have been a part of it ever since.

"I hope we're helping turn people onto Howard's music, even though we're coming from a very different place in time and a very different style," Millard said. "I just know that when people hear Howard's music, it may take them one or two rounds or even seven, but once you're hooked, you're really hooked. A festival like this is a nice alternative for something like Bonnaroo. And what we do is such a close cousin of East Tennessee and bluegrass music.

"We try to emphasize the blues and ragtime elements, but those are both a sort of tributary to a lot of music in that area. It's just that what we do is just great music with a little jump and a little swing to it."