Chicago soul great Syl Johnson is 74 years old, and he can’t remember a year that music didn’t play a fundamental role in his life.

    While growing up in a one-bedroom shack in Mississippi, young Sylvester Thompson was around music all the time (his name was changed to Johnson once he started recording in Chicago). His father and uncles played violin, guitar and banjo, and Sylvester and his brothers Jimmy and Mack hung on every note.

    “My daddy could play harmonica as good as Little Walter,” Johnson says. By the time he came to Chicago as a teenager in 1950, young Syl was a pretty fair guitar player. He bonded with a kid named Sam Maghett, future Chicago blues great “Magic Sam,” and soon became a key player on Chicago’s blues, soul and R&B scenes.

John Mellencamp: The singer-songwriter is coming off an intriguing series of albums emphasizing his songwriting and his debt to roots blues, country and folk, a direction that may shake up his shows from greatest-hits routine, 6:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday at Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State St., $53.58, $84.37; $104.84, $138.18; ticketmaster.com.

Mavis Staples: The soul matriarch is enjoying one heck of a renaissance in the last decade, most recently recording an album with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, “You’re Not Alone,” that is among the best of her career, 8 p.m. Saturday at Park West, 322 W. Armitage, $30; etix.com.

Syl Johnson: The Chicago singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer is one of the unsung heroes of blues, soul and R&B of the last few decades, but a new box set by the Chicago-based Numero Group label gives him his due. For this appearance, he'll be performing some of his classics with a 27-piece band, 8 p.m. Saturday at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Av, $28; oldtownschool.tix.com.

greg@gregkot.com

    Syl Johnson is sitting in the South Side offices of his Numero Group record label and examining a 40-year-old portrait of himself in a rare moment when he wasn’t playing a gig, running a recording session or working a day job. The face in the photo is partially shaded, slightly ominous, deadly serious, staring down at the camera as if to say, “I’ve got better things to do than stand around posing for photographs.”

    “That’s a guy who didn’t drink, who didn’t smoke, who didn’t chase women, who was never very far from music,” Johnson says when asked about his younger self. “I was good. Like Obama – he was a community organizer, right? – I knew how to organize. You couldn’t organize and be a whiskey head.”

    The organizer appears on the cover of “Syl Johnson: Complete Mythology” (Numero Group), a four-CD, six-LP box set that is in many ways the Chicago label’s crowning achievement, and quite possibly Johnson’s as well. It documents the earliest portion of his career in Chicago as a quadruple-threat singer-musician-songwriter-producer who released quality music at a steady rate but never quite ascended to star level. Johnson trafficked in every style of the day, presaging some trends, piggybacking on others. “I’ve got to get over,” Johnson sang on a 1965 single, and he worked all the angles: soul and funk, but also blues, pleading ballads, a hint of pop, protest music.