Concert pays tribute to LI musician Mose Allison

When Mose Allison agreed to attend a ceremony in 2012 honoring his legacy with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in his small Delta hometown of Tippo, his son John was in disbelief.

“He was nominated three times for a Grammy, but he never went to the black-tie event. He said he didn’t believe in renting shoes,’ ” says John Allison about his musician dad, a longtime Smithtown resident who died in 2016.

Now John, who moved to his father’s Southern birthplace a half-dozen years ago, is back in the area where he grew up with his three siblings to attend the U.S. premiere screening of the BBC documentary “Ever Since the World Ended” about his dad and “The Word From Mose,” a concert tribute to the low-key icon at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook Saturday, March 24, at 7 p.m.

Fusing Delta blues, bebop and wittily sardonic lyrics, Mose Allison inspired a generation of artists, particularly English rockers. (The Rolling Stones opened for him in the 1960s.) Van Morrison, The Clash, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello and The Yardbirds have all recorded covers of Allison’s hybrid-styled songs that often have wry, down-home punchlines such as the acerbically titled “Your Mind Is on Vacation (And Your Mouth Is Working Overtime).”

The Who’s Pete Townshend acknowledges a debt to Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues” in the writing of the band’s high-charting anthem “My Generation.” “He once commented, my father’s voice was so reserved, so smooth, yet you can hear it screaming,” says John Allison.

Mose Allison’s broad influence was felt at home, too, by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, The Pixies, Johnny Winter, Hot Tuna, Diana Krall and Willie Nelson, to name a few. R.E.M.’s breakthrough hit, “The End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” says John Allison, found inspiration in the Mose Allison lyrics “Ever since the world ended, I faced the future with a smile.”

Guitarist Peter Kennedy, who will interpret Allison’s music this weekend along with Abbie Gardner, Pat Wictor and Jack Licitra, recalls meeting him at a small club in Washington, D.C., in 1978. “I was in the opening act, so we all hung out backstage,” Kennedy remembers. “He was a soft-spoken hipster gentleman with no trace of rock star ego.”

The Mississippi Delta-born phenom, who began his music education with a jukebox at the service station across from his family’s cotton farm, never missed a gig, says his son, and never used a booking agent, opting instead to schedule his engagements using business cards he collected in a box.

To be sure, Mose Allison liked to do it his way. In 2006, he was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame, though his music resists categorization. “He was socially relevant before Bob Dylan, satirical before Randy Newman and rude before Mick Jagger, so I once asked him, ‘How come you are not a big star?’ ” John Allison recalls. “He replied, ‘Just lucky, I guess.’ ”