Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen perform Friday at 8 p.m. at Kirk Avenue Music Hall.

There were few, if any, blueprints for pop music success in 1964, when the Byrds began a musical trip that landed them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The band members had come out of folk and bluegrass scenes in Southern California when they started plugging in their instruments to play covers of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and others. Forty-five years gone, Byrds member Chris Hillman says he thinks the blueprint his act was writing influenced Dylan's legendary switch to electric guitar rock music.

Hillman himself has long since turned back to the bluegrass, country and folk music he grew up on. When he and longtime associate Herb Pedersen come to play Friday night at Kirk Avenue Music Hall, listeners can expect rootsier versions of such Byrds classics such as "Eight Miles High" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!"

Hillman's resume goes much deeper. He formed country-rock pioneer act the Flying Burrito Brothers with Gram Parsons. He formed country music hitmakers the Desert Rose Band with multi-instrumentalist Pedersen and the great guitarist John Jorgenson. There were lots of other influential projects, too, including Manassas, with Stephen Stills, and McGuinn, Clark & Hillman, with two other ex-Byrds, Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark.

But it was his return to acoustic roots that gave Hillman new musical verve. Hillman said that in much of the 1970s and '80s, he was more or less clocking in. When McGuinn, Clark & Hillman broke up about 1981, Hillman decided to unplug. He picked up his mandolin and started playing folk and bluegrass festivals as a duo with musical accomplice Al Perkins, a brilliant Dobro player.

The multi-talented Hillman decided to get his mandolin chops back up, and wound up touring with Dan Fogelberg as part of a bluegrass band that would become the Desert Rose Band.

Hillman and Pedersen have been working together ever since and are planning to record a live record on the West Coast in November.

"Now, playing with Herb and doing shows like coming into Roanoke, I almost have that passion I had at 18," Hillman, 64, said by phone last week from his home in Ventura, Calif. "I don't have any pressure on me to produce a single for the radio. ... I'm lucky people still want to hear me play, and come out. It's really a blessing ... I feel that rebirth now."

Hillman is well aware of the influence his music has had -- on listeners and bands alike. He said that his audiences are about equally split between people his age, who grew up with the Byrds' music, and college kids who are infatuated with that band and others from the 1960s. He said he is grateful for that, because he only got into professional music at age 17 because he loved it so much.

"That was the best part of it all," he said. "We didn't make a million dollars ... but we left an incredible musical path in the way that we approached music.

"I really was a lucky guy," he said. "I got to fulfill that dream."

But the music business today is a different thing altogether. When record labels do sign bands, they don't give them time to develop their style and sound. With the rise of music downloading, the scene is so diffuse and there is so much elevated talent out there that it's extremely difficult to gain the kind of traction that the Byrds and the Beatles had.

So, when someone asks Hillman for advice about making it -- and he hears that question about twice a month -- he answers them this way: Get your education.

Hillman did one semester of junior college and never got a chance to get his credits and transfer.

"Don't give up that band," he tells them. "Keep the band together. Play wherever you can. Play for free. Have fun with your music. But get a four-year college degree -- something that you really like ... stay on the educational curve. Because the music business is not what it was when I was in it in 1964.

"But don't give up your dream, or your passion."