JAMES Peterson thought he heard a burglar downstairs in the blues club he and his wife and family lived above in Buffalo, New York. It was just after 4a.m. and Peterson, mine host of The Governor’s Inn, hadn’t been in bed long. He grabbed the gun he kept handy for just such a situation and went down to confront this intruder.

The Governor’s Inn had recently taken delivery of a Hammond organ to accommodate visiting players such as Dr Lonny Smith and Big John Paton but the “intruder” trying to figure out how the organ worked was more of a beginner and certainly a minor.

“I’d seen this brute taking up its position on the stage,” says Peterson’s son, Lucky, fifty years on from the night he almost got shot for breaking into his father’s club. “It wasn’t so much the sound that intrigued me as its size. To a three-year-old boy, these things are massive and I was crawling all over it when my father switched on the lights and saw that I wasn’t no burglar.”

As Lucky remembers it, he wasn’t sent back to bed. Instead, his father, who played guitar but also knew his way around a keyboard, showed him how to accompany a twelve bar blues, marking out the chords with cigarette butts from a nearby ashtray.

“He’d sing a line and say, right, play the notes with the white cigarette butts, now play the notes with the brown cigarette butts. I must have shown some musical ability, because he’d invite me up onstage after that and I got to play with all these people who I didn’t know at the time were big blues names: Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, Freddie King – they all had this little tiddler accompanying them on that mighty Hammond.”

At three, Lucky, who makes his Scottish debut at Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival this weekend, was already something of a stage veteran. Before he added Hammond organ to his repertoire he’d been playing drums and doing an okay job. No child who grows up above a blues club, he says, is going to turn down the chance to beat a drum or crash a cymbal. The phrase “kid in a sweet shop” springs easily to mind and turned out to be even more apt when the great Koko Taylor, a regular visitor, discovered Lucky’s fondness for Juicy Fruit gum. When Lucky backed her up she’d bring him a whole box of gum, and it would be gone in an hour, he adds.

By this time Lucky had made his first recordings as a five year old blues boy wonder, produced by Chicago blues legend Willie Dixon no less. He appeared on prime time television programmes including the Ed Sullivan Show and was a star turn at his dad’s club, singing, and playing guitar as well as organ now. He doesn’t remember much about recording with Dixon but he became aware at quite a young age that he “wasn’t going to be a doctor.”

By the age of sixteen he’d been lured onto the road with Chess Records star Little Milton and within a few months he was Milton’s musical director, opening shows with his own spot as a singer-guitarist-keyboardist.

Looking back he says he might have turned professional too soon but being a typical teenager he wanted to get away from home and be independent, so he jumped at the opportunity.

“I didn’t turn out too bad,” he says. “I could have been much worse and it was an adventure. I was never really interested in going to college because music was my college. I grew up pretty quickly and I learned a lot but at the same time it was a lot of fun, if also a lot of hard travelling.”

One of the bonuses of joining Little Milton was meeting and getting lessons from Hammond organ master Jimmy Smith. They became good friends, even if Lucky hadn’t recognised Smith when the latter joined him on the organ stool for a four-handed blues during a jam session in California during his first tour with Milton.

“I heard people saying, 'That’s Jimmy Smith' and I’m thinking, what, THE Jimmy Smith? Playing a duet with me? He was cool, though, and it turns out it was a club he liked to just go along to and hang out in.”

Bobby Blue Bland and Koko Taylor, paying dollars as well as boxes of gum, were other band leaders Lucky worked with before striking out on his own. Today, he’s regarded as one of the blues’ current hottest properties. As quietly spoken and unassuming offstage as he is dynamic onstage and having been around star attractions all his life, however, he’s down to earth about what he does for a living.

“I just want to leave people feeling happy,” he says.

Lucky Peterson plays George Square Spiegeltent, Edinburgh on Sunday, July 24.