Jon Worley plays a musical genre he calls Foot-stompin' Afro-Appalachian Blues.

A native of Morristown, Tenn., a small town about 30 miles east of Knoxville, he traces it back to the medicine shows that traveled the South during prohibition in the mid-1930s.

The shows sold alcohol disguised as elixirs and the entertainment featured both white and black musicians playing to an integrated audience. No one much cared because the shows were illegal right from the get-go.

"The kind of music that I come from," Worley says in a strong southern accent, "goes back to that root, where you had one white musician look at one black musician; it could have been anybody from Leadbelly to Woody Guthrie in his teenage years. But they said, 'You know what, we're playing the same three chords and we're both talking about the truth.' "

Leadbelly and Guthrie, however, did not feature Worley's musical attack.

The 32-year-old sings and plays the expected guitar and blues harmonica. But he straps a tambourine to his left foot and also plays a 1966 Wurlitzer keyboard that he runs through a couple of amplifiers to create a "wall of sound."

Worley will bring his keyboard, which he calls his "super-secret weapon," to the Lititz Junction Tavern for a show Friday.

He will perform original songs with socially conscious themes, along with old gospel and blues tunes.

"I try to pay homage as much as I can," Worley says. "I like to be as progressive as the next kid, but if you ain't got no roots, your fruit can't get too ripe, can it?"

Worley, a terrific storyteller who seemingly draws from a deep well of knowledge, says he has a degree in philosophy from Walter State Community College in Morristown.

He is engaged to Tiffany Cox, a native of the Ephrata-Akron area, and lives in a 24-foot Apache RV currently parked in Akron.

"If I have to, I can pull out in the middle of a field and plug up 1,500 watts of power and play for chipmunks, squirrels or 2,000 people -- whichever comes first," Worley says.

He currently is splitting his time between Lancaster County and Knoxville, spending one month at a time in each place. He says he has regular gigs within a 200-mile radius of both places and makes enough money to support himself.

That wasn't always the case.

"I took a break at the beginning of this year because I had played almost 300 shows in three years for basically no money," he says. "I woke up pretty much homeless in the back of my minivan with one of my teeth falling out and my ankle broke and I said, 'Man, I gotta do this different.' "

Back in Tennessee, Worley does play with a group called the Cornbred Blues Band that has made a couple of recordings.

He says he hopes to make another album with the band in October and also has a number of other projects in mind, including putting together an 18-piece band he plans to call Black Jesus and the Holy Rollers.

"There's nothing better in this world," Worley says, "than singing to a room full of 50 desperate, lonely, disparaged drunks at 2 in the morning and me playing a righteous version of 'Wayfaring Stranger' with the blues harp in it and see every one of those people get the biggest smile on their face. And they don't know why, but they do. It's a little effect I like to call dirty gospel."

The most interesting project he has in mind revolves around Guy Carawan. Carawan, 82, is a folk musician and musicologist who lives in Tennessee and is credited with introducing the song "We Shall Overcome" to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Worley says he would like to make field recordings of Carawan playing the songs he knows. Then he would like to take those recordings and use contemporary musicians to re-record them for a modern audience, sort of like what Billy Bragg and Wilco did with the Woody Guthrie songs for the "Mermaid Avenue" albums.

"I like to come in and kick down musical barriers," Worley says, "and have purple-haired ladies and gutter punks and gangsters and bikers and a bunch of hippies all hanging out in one room together and everybody getting along.

"Music is one of the only things that really can do that. Well, that and a lot of beers."

Jon Worley

Friday, 7 p.m.

Lititz Junction Tavern

55 N. Water St., Lititz

626-5684 www.lititzjunction.com