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As a kid, blues musician John D'Amato wasn't given much of a chance of making it.

Not as a musician, and not as a human being. D'Amato, you see, was born with a congenital heart defect.

"When I was born, they basically told my parents, 'This kid's not gonna make it,'" D'Amato told The Daily Times this week. "There was no operation to fix it, so I was going to the doctor every month growing up, getting all of these tests done. Finally, someone developed this procedure, and the next thing I know I was in the hospital for a month.

"I'm lucky I was a 9-year-old kid when it happened, because if I had to go through it today, I'd probably freak out. But I just thought that was normal, and being in the hospital for a month meant I was going to get all of these toys, which I thought was pretty cool."

In addition to the toys, D'Amato came away from that hospital stay with a new lease on life. Already, he was a guitarist, having discovered the lure of music through his sister -- and a Sear's catalog.

"I remember being about 4 or 5 and flipping through it and seeing this violin and thinking it looked really cool and wondering what it sounded like," D'Amato said. "Not long after that, my sister -- who was a little bit older, got an acoustic guitar and a couple of Jimi Hendrix albums, and I would sneak into her room and listen and think, 'This is so cool!' And I'd try to play what I was hearing on her guitar."

Growing up in New Haven, Conn., D'Amato was surrounded by music. A cousin was in a band that got signed to Roulette Records; throughout his neighborhood and his life, musician friends and relatives were more than happy to encourage young John to join in. At 15, he became the first contemporary guitarist accepted into an experimental performing arts high school and quickly gained respect in the New Haven music scene as an ace guitarist.

But it would still be a few years before he took up the blues as his genre of choice.

"It seems like I was always waking up in someone else's dream," he said. "My wife was a vocalist, and I played in her country band, and then I hooked up with another vocalist, and I was mainly trying to really work the country route for a while.

"In 2001, I moved to Nashville and played all the bars on Broadway, and down there, you have to play for four hours straight. The guy I was playing with would take a break, though, and ask me to do a couple of songs, so I played these blues songs I had in my pocket. People were telling me, 'That's really cool; I'm digging this,' and I was digging it, too. I was enjoying being the front guy."

The blues, he added, had always been there; it was just a matter of rediscovering his love of it again. Growing up, blues-heavy rock albums like Led Zeppelin I and Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" were in constant rotation; professional lessons led him briefly into jazz and jazz-fusion, but the emergence of the Allman Brothers Band in the early 1970s reinforced his love of the blues.

Rediscovering it in Nashville, he said, was the catalyst to start living for himself and following his own muse.

"It was always there with the blues, that feeling that I could never find anywhere else," he said. "I've played rock and jazz and country, and I never had that feeling that I got when I listened to the blues. With the blues, you can just play your ass off, and when I started doing it again, I knew it was where I belonged. It was almost like finding myself again."

As a blues artist, he's thrown himself into the mix with wild abandon. Channeling the specter of death that hovered over his childhood and the gratitude he's found in surviving and making a living doing what he loves comes pouring out of his guitar in a torrent, an otherworldly wail of love and loss and sadness and ego.

"The guy that really inspired me a lot was Joe Louis Walker," D'Amato said. "He's a tremendous blues artist who came to prominence in the 1980s and '90s, and I did a show out in LA with him after deciding to get back into blues. It was kind of thrown together, but when I heard him play, he immediately became my favorite blues players. Him and BB King. He's had a big influence on me, and I've listened to him since I was a kid."

Saturday night, D'Amato will stop by Brackins Blues Bar in downtown Maryville for a performance, bringing with him a bassist and a drummer for a show he describes as an "in-your-face" show to which he gives 100 percent, every night. He does so because he's got nothing to lose -- after all, surviving the poor health of his childhood puts everything else in perspective, he said.

"You know what this business is like -- it has its ups and downs, and more downs than ups in the beginning," he said. "But that showed me that God can get me through anything, and because of that, I'm thankful for everything I've got. I just keep living it and pushing it, because you never know when it's going to end."