Carnival of Soul

TEXARKANA, Ark. — Mark Searcy Middleton enjoyed some of his best years in Texarkana, and Friday brings a blues rendezvous tonight when the musician’s guitar licks fill the downtown Hopkins Icehouse.

Now based in San Antonio, Searcy returns to Hopkins for his Tour de Razorback concert. It was in San Antonio where he forged a career in the blues after a workplace accident inspired him to pick up the guitar again.

The guitar was an instrument he’d first learned as a teenager, only to let it go as he raised a family here in Texarkana. As part of rehab on his hands, he picked the instrument back up to give his fingers strength, and the challenge brought him a blossoming career in music.

With the stage name Mark Searcy, he took his inspiration from blues musicians dating back to the 1920s and ’30s. He’s parlayed that inspiration to record 11 albums, get a guitar tab anthology published and win a bevy of awards: the 2014 Texas Music Awards Musician of the Year, a 2013 Austin Blues Society Heart of Texas Blues Challenge for solo/duo, a 2007 San Antonio Guitar Wars winner for best acoustic performance and several other honors and kudos that speak to his talent and dedication.

Performing as special guests with Searcy Friday will be Texarkana’s own Sean Womack, who’s a good friend of Searcy’s, plus Texas-based blues singer Ginger Pickett. Show time is 8 p.m.

Searcy’s roots here run deep. “I was raised in Benton, and then I moved to Texarkana when I was 19. I raised basically my family there. I lived in Texarkana for nearly 20 years,” he said. He worked at the old St. Michael hospital and then at the new one.

So Searcy has friends who’ve been here 40 years, and he also has family and friends who’ll be at tonight’s show, too, coming in from central Arkansas. This makes tonight’s show a homecoming of sorts.

“It’s a reunion in a whole bunch of ways,” he said. It will give folks here a chance to finally see him perform.

While raising children in Texarkana, he says, he didn’t have the time or anything else to get music going. Then an accident with a serpentine belt on a treadmill injured his hand.

“Four surgeries later, I thought a guitar was a way to rehab,” Searcy said. He relearned how to hold a guitar. It helped him. “Then I got sort of obsessed with it,” he remembers. Without the dexterity, slide guitar became an interest. He spent time in Chicago, too, getting a blues club education.

Over the past 15 years, his knowledge deepened as he gained more of an interest in writing, arranging, producing and recording. Why the blues?

“Going back I realized — it took me a long time to figure out — that all the music that I liked growing up was heavy based on blues,” Searcy said. He was introduced to music from the likes of Son House, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

“I spent probably two years driving back and forth to Houston once a week, and I listened to Robert Johnson’s 29 recordings like all the way down there and back — just replay, replay, replay,” he said.

Then he started listening to Delta blues music and jazz. Searcy has incorporated rock, blues and jazz into his own style.

What inspires him lyrically and musically? “It kind of varies. Sometimes it can be anything from a smell or a sight or a vision. Or it can be memories capturing things,” Searcy said, adding, “I’ve written a lot of material just based on my upbringing, things you’d learn or people that you remember.” Even his vision of the future found its way into his music.

His most recent album is “My Color,” a 2018 release. He lives in the Hill Country, where there is both plenty of talent and plenty of venues where he can both listen and play. “It’s just mind-boggling,” he said.

And being a blues musician where Texas singer-songwriter country music is the thing, he finds that sometimes people are looking for something a little different, so they look to the blues. He can play acoustic roots blues as well as blues rock or electric.

“You can get live music any night of the week, just about, especially if you’re willing to drive a little bit,” Searcy said.

To hear his music live, drive yourself to Hopkins Icehouse Friday for his Tour de Razorback show. To learn more about him, visit MarkSearcy.com.

(Tickets: $8 general admission. Get tickets in advance at Eventbrite.com. Hopkins Icehouse is located at 301 E. 3rd St. More info: 870-774-3333.)