If you hadn’t heard of Boo Hanks before 2008, you could be forgiven. But after that – after the Roots of American Music Festival at the Lincoln Center, after sharing a bill with Patti Smith, after coverage in the New York Times, after the New Orleans Blues Festival, Chicago Blues Festival, a tour of Europe and countless festivals in this country – Southside Virginians should know of Virgilina’s favored son.

“He’s billed as basically the last of the Piedmont Blues [musicians],” says Ross LeCompte, a professional musician who retired to Clarksville after a career ranging from Broadway to “The Merv Griffin Show” and a friend of Hanks’.

Hanks, now in his 80s, gets attention for his delicate finger-style guitar picking popularized by Blind Boy Fuller, the most famous exponent of Piedmont Blues. The Piedmont Blues takes its name from the East Coast’s Piedmont region, roughly Richmond to Atlanta, but it had players in many Mid-Atlantic states and found its heyday in the African-American music of the 1930s and 40s.

LeCompte says Piedmont Blues was born of fieldworkers toiling all day, then coming home to pick a guitar or banjo and sing of love, patriotism, adversity.

“That’s the tradition that Boo Hanks comes from,” says LeCompte. “The real jazz – not this stuff that’s rehearsed and studied.”

Indeed: “Blues consists of hard times, disappointment and mistreatment, and I’ve had that all my life,” Hanks tells the camera in a video made by Tom Ciaburri of Music Maker Relief Foundation.

(If Hanks sounds embittered, consider that LeCompte calls him one of the more easygoing, upbeat people he knows – albeit one who takes his music seriously.)

Hanks got his start by selling packets of garden seed and saving the proceeds for a guitar, according to Music Maker Relief Foundation, which seeks to support practitioners of Southern roots music while popularizing the genre. His first songs were tunes he heard his father played after long days in the tobacco field. As a young man in the 1940s, according to Music Maker, Hanks earned pocket change playing guitar at barn dances with cousins accompanying him on mandolin and spoons.

LeCompte says Hanks played with R&B groups in the 1960s.

But Hanks was a spry 79 before he made his first recording, “Pickin’ Low Cotton.”

Boo Hanks performs with Tad Walters, a 30-something Raleigh, N.C., blues musician, at The Prizery Saturday, Sept. 11, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and $6 for youth. For tickets: (434) 572-8339 or buy tickets online at www.prizery.com.