Radoslav Lorkovic, 5 p.m.

In 1985, Radoslav Lorkovic played at the first Blues Fest. At last year's festival, Radoslav was the piano man with the Holmes Brothers. He adds their name to a long list of musicians he's collaborated with in performance and on recordings, including Odetta and Greg Brown. His long touring career on the R&B and folk circuits has led Radoslav from the venues of the Midwest's upper Mississippi River area to Italian castles, the Canary Islands, the Yup'ik villages of Alaska, and Carnegie Hall.

T.J. Wheeler, 2 p.m.

Blues guitarist and educator T.J. Wheeler spent a week's Blues in the Schools residency in the Quad Cities during Black History Month this year; he conducted workshops at eight schools, one university, and one museum. The Mississippi Valley Blues Society education committee was so impressed with T.J.'s blues education abilities that he was invited back for the 25th-annual IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. Besides performing on the tent stage and conducting a workshop at 1 p.m. on Saturday where he'll share "Back Stories of the Blues," T.J. will preside over a BlueSKool slot along with kids he will have taught at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Rock Island just a few days before the Fest.

Marquise Knox, 2 p.m.

Marquise Knox is a young blues artist who comes out of the St. Louis area. The guitar is his instrument of choice on which he says he can best express himself. Marquise also plays the harmonica and of course sings - very well, I might add. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform this year in St. Louis on our return trip from the International Blues Challenge in Memphis. I was pleasantly surprised to see the poise this young man has and the stage presence of someone many years older.

Singer, songwriter, and slide-guitarist Roy Rogers is not a blues purist. He could write a song in the style of Robert Johnson - the reason he became a blues player in the first place - but what would be the point of that?

"I'm just trying to stretch it," he said in a recent phone interview.

So on his new recording Split Decision - his first studio album with his Delta Rhythm Kings trio in seven years - there's the instrumental "Your Sweet Embrace," with a flamenco section by Ottmar Liebert, and "Rite of Passage" has a warm, funky jazz groove before taking a guitar-solo detour into the blues. "Bitter Rain" deals with Hurricane Katrina and has what Rogers called "almost kind of a tempest riff," and closing instrumental "Walkin' the Levee" features sax and a guitar tone simultaneously fuzzy and razor sharp. "River of Tears" is an irresistibly upbeat pop number despite its theme of sadness.