At 49, Larry McCray happily considers himself at an awkward age for a bluesman.

"I'm getting to be a veteran now. I'm not a young kid anymore, and I've got enough seniority under my belt to start getting a little bit of respect from the older people," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Flint, Mich.

But he knows what it was like to be one of the genre's rebels as well.

"I feel like I was one of the young ones who tried to modify the blues," he said. "I tried to take it from being just a nostalgic thing to bringing it into the modern forefront. Even before Robert Cray had his success, I was out there doing what I was doing."

McCray, who performs Saturday, was previously in Davenport's LeClaire Park during 1992, but he has frequented the Rock Island Brewing Co., appearing there several times since then.

In his early years, McCray said, he got heaps of criticism from blues purists for his style.

"I held to my guns and did what was the right thing to do," he said. "You look back in history and anybody who had success as an individual artist stayed true to their music. That's what you have to do in any art form."

McCray said he's seen performers who he considers less talented make bigger names of themselves on a national scale than he has.

But it doesn't bother him anymore.

"I don't take it personally. Before, I did," he said. "It doesn't matter what you think about yourself. It's how you're perceived by your listening audience and what other people think."