In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument's Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.

When I asked him where that put him in the pedal steel's development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. "Somebody has to put me there," he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. "I wouldn't put myself there."

But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.

As always, the performers at this year's IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival will arrive with a host of awards to their names. But here's a guarantee: Albert Cummings will be the only one boasting a citation from the architectural digest Remodeling.

"We just won our fourth national award," says the fourth-generation builder, of his construction company based in Williamstown, Massachusetts. "I got an award from Remodeling magazine called 'The Big 50.' They select 50 builders in the United States [for recognition], and I was one of 'em this year. Went to Washington, D.C., to the Ritz-Carlton. Got treated like royalty."

I've read about Nappy Brown's energetic and ribald stage antics when he was a big star in the 1950s. And having seen him lying on the floor doing the "bug dance" at the 1993 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival, I asked him what we should expect of his set with Muddy Waters alumnus Bob Margolin at the fest this year.

"You can expect everything from me!" he said. "I'm gonna pull off my clothes on the stage. I'm a lemon-squeezing daddy - I have to pull them clothes off. I won't have nothin' on but my shorts!" Nappy laughs with a big, deep-throated guffaw.

"You got a minute?" Drink Small asked me during our phone interview.

"Yeah," I said.

"All right," he said. The bluesman left the phone. A television was audible in the background.

After a few seconds, the man who for 35 years has called himself the "Blues Doctor" returned with his guitar and played a song about the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival - how he wants to the meet the mayor of Davenport, how he played the event 10 or 12 years ago. "I can do the same thing," sang Small, who returns to the festival this weekend, "but I can do it better at the age of 74."