This is the kind of music he's been listening to since he was a child, growing up in the Calliope housing project in New Orleans. Living in that city was its own musical education, of course. Keeping its own lazy pace in a bend of the Mississippi River, the Big Easy has long absorbed the music of the American South, of the Caribbean, and of Africa. 

Everything eventually makes its way down the river or across the sea to New Orleans, where jazz, blues, country, reggae and many other styles are simmered into a gumbo of astonishing riches. But music was also inescapable inside the Neville home: Aaron's mother and uncle were once a song and dance team, his uncle George Landry ("Uncle Jolly") led a band of Mardi Gras Indians and his father collected Nat "King" Cole records. Aaron, as the third of the four Neville Brothers, also had the influence of older siblings Art and Charles.

He loved it all, which is why he still sings it all. Aaron was embraced by Nashville when he made George Jones' "The Grand Tour" the title song to his second A&M album. "I grew up going to the movies watching Roy Rogers and Gene Autry," admits Aaron. I was a big Hank Williams fan, and later on I loved Patsy Cline. I was a cowboy. I used to yodel and everything." 

There's also a tip of the hat to an old favorite of Aaron's, Bill Withers. In the early Seventies, when Bill Withers had his biggest hits, Aaron was at a low point in his career. He'd been making records since the early sixties, and had a couple of hits including "Over You" and of course, "Tell It Like It Is." But like virtually every other great New Orleans musician of the time, he wasn't the one making money off his success. Instead, he had to work on the docks, in the steel mills, wherever else he could get a job that paid the bills.

But he still sang when he had the chance – and in the small clubs where he appeared, he would perform Withers' classic hits "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Use Me."

This is a man who used prayers to St. Jude – the patron saint of lost causes – to get him through the years when it seemed as if his vocal gifts might not be enough to rescue him from the dead-end life of many of his friends. Faith sustained Aaron when his musical and personal fortunes were at their lowest, and it sustained him after he rejoined his three brothers on the infectious "Wild Tchoupitoulas" album in 1976.

It would be thirteen more years, several acclaimed but unsuccessful albums as the Neville Brothers, and countless prayers before the breakthrough: first the Neville Brothers masterful 1989 album "Yellow Moon," then Aaron's four duets with longtime fan Linda Ronstadt on her double platinum "Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like The Wind," then his first solo album on A&M records, "Warm Your Heart."

Two albums, four Grammy Awards and a couple Rolling Stone magazine critics' poll victories later, Aaron remembers what it took to get him here – and so he ends each of his albums with some sort of hymn.

With every new album, Aaron Neville carries on the legacy of the greats who influenced him, and sings for the friends and relatives who didn't make it through the obstacles and the family that has stood behind him. The open, generous heart, at the core of his music is tattooed with the names, emblems, and dreams of those who came before, those who didn't make it this far, those who needed his music in the past and will need it in the future.

"They've been with me almost all my life, since I was a teenager," he says of his visible tattoos, the ones that adorn his face, his arms, his body. "And they'll be there forever." So will his music.