Blues and gospel are two sides of the same coin, says TJ Wheeler, but they rarely meet.

Wheeler beats the odds when the bluesman unites with the Sing Out! gospel choir Jan. 25.

“The two musical forms are linked at the hip,” Wheeler said. “Like with siblings – there’s often a rift. So, even today, having a bluesman like myself and a wonderful gospel artist like Pat Wright on the same stage is fairly unusual.”

While the one form is ostensibly secular and the other, spiritual, Wheeler points out that both are rooted in the African American experience.

“You find the same cadences,” Wheeler said, “the same call-and-response. You’ve got the oratory and the building and release of tension.”

In both, Wheeler says, there is little division between audience and singer, a feature that may be traced to African dance music that followed the dancers’ movements, rather than the other way around.

“The pacing is a footnote to the contribution of the audience and so it’s nothing new.” Wheeler said.

And both idioms have been looked at askance by white America.

At issue, Wheeler says, was the power and physicality of the music, as well as what Wheeler calls “the moan” – the identifying slurred notes and quarter-notes of both forms.

“‘The moan’ permeates the blues,” he said. “But actually, African American music has been described as ‘the devil’s music’ for over 400 years.”

According to Wheeler, it was an early 20th century musician who cross-pollinated the blues and spirituals, bringing the two forms even closer.

“Georgia Tom” Dorsey, a 1920s blues piano player, became a devout Christian after his wife and family were killed in a car wreck.

Dorsey officially gave up the blues for spirituals – but the prolific songwriter merged the idioms.

“So gospel is a total blend of the dynamics of the blues with the choral aspects and intense faith of the spirituals,” Wheeler said.

‘Bremelo’

Wheeler himself is an odd blend: a white bluesman singing Mississippi Delta blues in his adopted New Hampshire home; a Bremerton kid with a Bainbridge patina.

“I was a ‘Bremelo,’” Wheeler said. “Yeah, that’s what Bainbridge kids call ‘em.”

At the age of 14, Wheeler was placed in a foster home on Bainbridge, and liked the island so well that, when he was reunited with his parents a year later, the whole family moved here.

Wheeler graduated from Strawberry Hill Alternative School in the program’s first class.

He encountered his first bluesmen at festivals and concerts in the Seattle area.

Unlike the rock stars of the day, who’d be hustled out back exits, surrounded by security, Wheeler says that the blues performers were oddly accessible.

“The first time I saw Muddy Waters, he was coming in the door at the Eagle’s Hall in Seattle, which was the local equivalent of Fillmore East. ” Wheeler said. “He was all alone, wearing a long fur coat and carrying his guitar.

He asked me where the stage was.”

Wheeler fell in love with the blues idiom and he’s been living it ever since.

A survivor of the music scene, he is still onstage to see 2003 named by Congress “The Year of the Blues.”

Wheeler hopes the year will bring the form to prominence.

“Jazz has slowly gotten respectability, but the blues is still rather looked down on,” Wheeler said. “As BB King once put it: ‘Being a blues musician is being black twice.’”

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Celebrate the fourth annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial “Sing Out!” beginning 12:30 p.m.. Jan. 25. (See calendar, page A10, for complete schedule). Information: 842-4164.