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In blues music, lots of players work to put their own stamps on all the subgenres. Guitarists use the old blueprints as jumping-off points for their own stylistic inclinations.

Rory Block, who performs Friday at Kirk Avenue Music Hall, thinks too much of the blueprints to leave them behind. For much of her four decades in music, she has worked to "crack the code" of artists such as Robert Johnson and Eddie "Son" House.

Her latest record, "Blues Walkin' Like A Man -- A Tribute to Son House" (Stony Plain), reveals her code-cracking skills while also reflecting a huge moment in her life.

Picking a legend's brain

In 1965, a 15-year-old Block was part of an audience that heard House at New York's Greenwich Village nightspot Village Gate. House, then 62, had been recently rediscovered, and was 35 years removed from the groundbreaking recordings he had done for Paramount.

Still, the emotion and presence in his playing, even his very look, summoned up the ghosts of those old records Block had been playing over and over as she tried to learn their secrets.

Before long, the guitar prodigy met the master. They would spend time together on several occasions, including a particularly powerful evening at a friend's house, Block said in a phone interview Monday.

"It was in retrospect so lucky that I was in the right place at the right time," she said. "If I could have known how short a period of time it really would be and how in retrospect even more precious, I probably would've asked a lot more questions. As it was, we just sat there in a natural way, brought up Robert Johnson, of course, and ... he told me that he'd taught Robert Johnson how to play guitar.

"We played together. We talked. We hung out for a while. I can never put in words how special, how inspiring that particular time with him really was. I played songs for him. He played. We talked about styles."

House's late-career manager, Dick Waterman, in a blurb for the "Blues Walkin' " liner notes, wrote that the two were "knee to knee" on that day.

"I thought that was a great imagery of how intimate and how close we really were, just sort of sitting there talking about music and playing," Block said.

Looking back, Block wishes she had taken notes and picked House's brain a little more about old history and details of recording, types of guitars and the like.

At least they discussed Johnson, whose recordings had also been rediscovered during this key period of the folk revival. Johnson, of course, was long dead, but his recordings had hit the retro crowd hard.

"The sense I got was that Robert Johnson was this ... new kid on the block, and all these established players like Son House and Willie Brown and Charlie Patton were the heavy-duty guitar players, and he wanted to be like [House]," Block said.

Preserving what's perfect

In the years since, Block has become a critically revered and often honored blues interpreter, with 21 albums of both originals and covers.

She paid tribute to Johnson in 2006, with her "The Lady & Mr. Johnson" (RykoDisc). Audiences at FloydFest 2006 heard her performing songs from that album. Like the Johnson disc, "Blues Walkin' " is the record of a woman reflecting not just the technique but the spirit of those iconic Mississippi bluesmen. That is no simple task, and it's easy to spot a fake. Block has their styles down cold, but she does not sound clinical. Her singing is reasonably faithful and intensely soulful.

Block said she has a responsibility to preserve the old styles through her playing.

"I always felt this tremendous desire to reproduce the music as it was written, note for note," she said. "Because you know what, I could do what anybody could do, which is reinterpret it in my own way. I could write a new song based on a song. Or I could try to transcribe it.

"And for some reason, my passion and my direction was transcribing it. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to crack the code. ... Seeing people like Bukka White, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, et cetera, in person, makes it very inspiring to play it the way they played it."

People have asked her why she doesn't do it her own way as opposed to a faithful reading of, say, Johnson's work. Her answer: He's the best, worthy of the approach a student takes to a classical master such as Andres Segovia.

"Why should you not aspire to the best?" she said. "Why should you not climb the mountain?"