Tab Benoit plays a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline, and the gritty, breathing tone of that semi-hollow guitar is the sound of the Louisiana swamps he has spent decades fighting to save. Born in 1967 in Houma, Louisiana, Benoit learned swamp blues not from sheet music but on stage at Tabby Thomas’s Blues Box in Baton Rouge, playing alongside living legends like Tabby Thomas, Raful Neal and Henry Gray after finishing high school in 1985. In this deep dive we trace how that apprenticeship in the lazy, dragging micro-timing of swamp blues carried him from a Baton Rouge trio in 1987 to national tours by 1991 and a recording career that began with “Nice and Warm” on Justice Records in 1992.

We follow his move to Vanguard and then Telarc, where “Wetlands” (2002) mixed autobiographical originals with Otis Redding and Professor Longhair covers, and “Whiskey Store” (2002) put him in the studio with Jimmy Thackery, Charlie Musselwhite and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section, Double Trouble. The episode covers his Grammy nomination for “Brother to the Blues,” his two B.B. King Entertainer of the Year awards, his 2003 founding of the nonprofit Voice of the Wetlands, and his decision to stay in Houma and build a music cafe, a recording studio and the Whiskey Bayou Records label rather than leave for Los Angeles or Nashville.

• What separates swamp blues from Chicago blues, and why its hesitation before the beat cannot be written on a staff
• How recording with Double Trouble’s Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton forced Benoit to elevate his playing
• The mechanics of Louisiana’s disappearing coast: levees starving the marsh of sediment and oil canals pushing saltwater into freshwater swamps
• Why the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year award is about commanding a room, not playing the fastest solo
• His 2009 Conservationist of the Year award from the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, the IMAX film “Hurricane on the Bayou,” and his role co-producing Alastair Greene’s “The New World Blues”