" One of the thrills of my life was singing with Bobby Bland three years ago, " says Mighty Sam McClain. " I’ve always admired the man. I patterned my singing on him — getting the big voice to come up from way down in the belly. To have him acknowledge me by asking me to join him on stage was such an honor. I thank God for that. "

McClain treasures his photos of that August day when Bland, who was already a major hitmaker in the ’60s when McClain was just beginning his career, invited him to the stage at the Portsmouth Blues Festival. Their duets under the summer sun were nothing less than an epic event — a pairing of two of the finest traditional soul and blues singers alive.

But, hey, even respect and admiration have their limits. Since McClain released his latest CD, One More Bridge To Cross, on his own Mighty Music label a month ago, his album has been running neck and neck with Bland’s new Blues at Midnight (Malaco). " I’ll see a radio station’s chart and one week he’s #1, " says McClain. " The next week it’s me. Then he’s got it again — and then it’s me. In the Living Blues charts, we’re battling for position and I’ve got #5. This has happened before when we’ve both put out albums, and I’ve always said, ‘Let Bobby get it. He’s been at this a lot longer than I have. He inspired me; he deserves it; give it to Bobby.’ But not this time. This time I want to beat his ass! "

And McClain, a Louisiana-born singer blessed with the kind of rich-toned, towering voice and chops that once-great American independent record labels like Stax and Atlantic were built upon, may succeed. After all, he’s worked his own ass off since the late ’80s rebuilding a career that crumbled the first time around. He entered the national music scene in 1966 with a cover of Patsy Cline’s " Sweet Dreams " that scored on the R&B charts and took him to Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. Then he spent two decades coming to grips with his life and his art, battling alcohol, homelessness, and failed relationships before at last finding himself. Beginning with 1993’s Give It Up to Love, McClain has released a series of first-rate albums that have won him a strong international fan base and enabled him to put a series of unhappy dealings with record labels behind him by taking matters into his own hands.

" On the previous albums, I had two days to record the whole thing, " he explains. " There were no overdubs. It was all live. If something wasn’t quite right, I was told there wasn’t enough money to go back and fix it. Then the labels would hardly buy any ads, and they’d just mail the CDs out and not be promoting them. For One More Bridge To Cross, I spent 10 or 12 days in the studio over two months and got everything to sound the way I wanted it to. "

And that’s damn good. McClain’s vocal performances are gripping as ever, whether he’s essaying the pure gospel number " Open Up Heaven’s Door " or laying down raw phrases on a funky shuffle like " If It Wasn’t for the Blues. " Preparing for the album also involved some house cleaning, but his new horn section is as tight and sharp as the players one hears on Al Green’s classic Hi Records sessions. Guitarist Chris Tofield also does a stellar job, with a sharp, flexible tone that ranges from traditional weeping blues lines to the Santana-like phrases of " What’s Your Name. "

McClain brought in a female backing vocalist, Conchetta Prio, for the first time, and the Boston-based veteran of commercial sessions gives him perfect support. Thanks to skillful overdubbing and her grasp of harmony singing, she’s a one-woman choir of angels on the sacred numbers that have increasingly become a part of McClain’s calling as a songwriter, and an earthy female yin to the yang of his masculine presence on the secular tunes.

Now based in Epping, New Hampshire, the 60-year-old belter is pleased that One More Bridge To Cross is getting the kind of marketing campaign he’s always wanted for his albums. Of course, he and his wife, Sandra, are responsible for it, supervising their small team and doing much of the work themselves, from mailings to radio to follow-up calls to bookings. McClain can afford to do this thanks largely to the success of " New Man in Town, " which found a home on Ally McBeal and has since been licensed to a number of corporate clients, including a European bank, for ads.

Reflecting on his career, he says, " It’s been a lot of work and a lot of bullshit and a lot of hard times and some good times, but it’s all been worth it to get to this point. At 13 years old, I left home with nothing but my own hurt and my pride, and now I’m in charge of my music and my business and my life and I have a wonderful woman to share it with and a lot of great people helping me. I thank God for all this every day. "

SINGER AND HARMONICA PLAYER Sugar Ray Norcia has also traveled a long road to become a fixture on the national blues scene. His journey began at the Knickerbocker Café in Westerly, Rhode Island (his home town), where he’d sneak in to hear Roomful of Blues when he was still in high school. Norcia formed his own band, Sugar Ray & the Bluetones, in the late ’70s and backed scores of bluesmen — including harp dynamo Big Walter Horton and the sly piano man Roosevelt Sykes — at the now-long-gone Speakeasy in Cambridge.

There were lean years, of course, but also rewarding associations. When guitarist Ronnie Earl, who’d played in the original Bluetones, became a solo artist, Norcia sang in Earl’s band the Broadcasters. And then in 1991 he joined Roomful of Blues for seven years, fronting the group that gave him his spark during its most successful period. During his time three of the enduring jump-blues outfit’s albums scored high on the Billboard blues chart. Norcia has released three solo albums since then, and the last two, 2000’s Rockin’ Sugar Daddy and the new Sugar Ray & the Bluetones Featuring Monster Mike Welch (both on Severn), have been especially rewarding returns to hard-delivered, mostly Chicago-style blues, replete with his rich, melodic harmonica blowing.

" My dad played great harmonica, so as a kid I heard him playing harp around the house, " is how he explains his beginnings on the instrument. " He was playing mostly train sounds and country tunes and couldn’t really bend notes like a blues player does. Later, I taught him how to do it. "

When as a teenager Norcia heard the amplified honk of Little Walter and Big Walter and then the unamplified recordings of John Lee Williamson and Rice Miller (both of whom performed under the name Sonny Boy Williamson), he got hooked on harmonica blues. In fact, he says, one of his reasons for leaving Roomful, where he was mostly employed for his elegant, swinging vocal style, was that " I wanted to get back to the harp full time. "

On Sugar Ray & the Bluetones Featuring Monster Mike Welch, he has. Almost every song starts with a solid harp riff or with a memorable lick from the guitar of Welch, who signed on two years ago. " And the Angels Sing " is a tune Norcia found in his collection of old 78 rpm recordings. He transposed the horn lines from big-band jazzman Les Brown’s version to harmonica and came up with a swinging instrumental. On " When the Sun Sets Red and Low, " a tune written by Bluetones bassist Michael " Mudcat " Ward and his son Clay, Norcia makes his harp wail like a Creole squeezebox over a zydeco-inspired beat. And Welch starts the Albert King instrumental " Funk-Shun " with a string-bending homage to the late Memphis master, but just before the halfway mark Norcia swaggers in with a bold amplified solo full of trills and hand-fanned vibrato to match the guitarist’s expressive command.

Although Norcia generally prefers to amplify his harmonicas, he plays directly into the microphone on " Feeling Blue, " which with Welch on National steel guitar plumbs the feel of old Southern string-band music. Then there’s the epic " Love and Trouble, " one of five songs on the CD written by Welch, where the singer and the string stinger trade phrases. Welch’s elegant bends and churning picking match the soaring peaks of Norcia’s vocal performance; together, they up the number’s emotional ante almost line by line.

" There are a lot of gunslingers out there who can play a million notes and have great chops, " says Norcia. " But what I hear in Mike’s playing is soul. It moves me. " Indeed, Welch, who began his career a decade ago as a 13-year-old prodigy, has found his own impressive voice on guitar in recent years. He provides Norcia with the kind of virtuosic foil the singer/harpman hasn’t had since his days with Earl. On a break from touring, Sugar Ray, Mike Welch, and the Bluetones will play their newest tunes at the Sit ’n Bull Pub in Maynard this Friday, May 16, and at the Sea Note on Nantasket Beach on Saturday May 31.

AS FOR ROOMFUL OF BLUES, they’re celebrating 35 years of bringing their horn-jazz-influenced sound to the world’s stages with a performance at the Regattabar in Harvard Square’s Charles Hotel this Saturday, May 17. It’s part of a tour behind That’s Right!, the octet’s debut recording for the nation’s largest blues indie label, Alligator.

With a full datebook, the group seem to be doing well, though this album — the first by the current line-up — is a letdown. It’s mostly up-tempo party music, without much subtlety. And subtlety is the essence of great blues. New singer Mark DuFresne is especially disappointing: he boasts a clear voice and a hearty delivery, but his belting has a limited tonal palette, and when he slows down for a tearjerker like " How Long Will It Last? " , there’s no nuance. Although he’s a veteran of the Pacific Northwest blues scene, he sounds like someone trained in musical theater who's faking his way through a blues gig, and that makes That’s Right! hard to listen to — no matter how well the three horns and guitarist Chris Vachon play.