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Courtesy Laurie Lewis

Born and raised in California, musician Laurie Lewis may not be from the bluegrass belt of the South, but according to her musical peers, she is a legend and a bona fide star.

“When I was around 13 or 14 years old, I went to see The Birds, and the Dillards opened for them. I just fell in love, and I wanted to play the bluegrass banjo,” Lewis recalled of her early music influences.

While she doesn’t do much banjo strumming publicly — she saves that for the confines of her home, she says — she has garnered a 30-year career of singing, song writing and playing stringed instruments, mostly guitar and fiddle. The Grammy-award winning artist — her album “True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe” earned her the honor in 1997 — will bring her talents to The Blue Loon tomorrow night. The 7 p.m. concert was organized by Mace and Trudy’s Acoustic Adventures of Fairbanks, and sponsored by the Fairbanks Folk Fest.

Trudy Heffernan of Acoustic Adventures said she is more than excited to have Lewis return to Fairbanks — she’s played Acoustic Adventures concerts twice and performed at the state fair — calling her an amazing, multi-instrumental artist.

“She’s a songwriter, a singer, an instrumentalist. She’s a triple threat,” Heffernan said.

An avid fan of Lewis’ work, Heffernan said the environmentally conscious musician is the type of visitor that will not only put on a great show but also appreciate the area.

“I am on her e-mail list and she almost always has some insightful comment about conservation and the environment. She’s really got something to say,” Heffernan said.

Like much of Lewis’ current work, the show will be a duet performance with musical partner Tom Rozum, a mandolinist and singer. The two are “completely dedicated to the art of the duet,” Lewis said, and have recorded 12 duet albums and performed together internationally. Their 1996 album “The Oak and the Laurel,” was nominated for a Grammy award. While some of their influences differ — Rozum is a New Englander and was more influenced by the Beattles than Lewis, she said — they also share an admiration for such classic folk and country artists as Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

“That Bakersfield era was gold for me, that hits home,” Lewis said.

Lewis said her approach to the folk and bluegrass genres is unique, due in part to her upbringing. Artists raised in the South, traditionally considered the bluegrass heartland, tend to want to play things the way they’ve heard them in the past, Lewis said, and also tend to bring in pop and rock ‘n’ roll influences. That was not the case for her in California.

“It would never occur to me to do that, probably because I didn’t hear much of that music,” she said.

Lewis’ influences included traditional jazz, where she played bass, and what she called “Tex-Mex” music, which “you couldn’t not listen to while growing up in California.”

“My music then was filtered through my personal lens, and colored in a particular way that was just me,” she said.

For Lewis, music is an international language, a device that can be used to transcend divisions of race, origin, culture and language and create an emotional understanding.

“The cliches are true. I am so lucky to have been able to travel all around the world, to Japan, Canada, all over Europe, and even when you can’t speak the language of the people at all, they understand the emotion of what you are singing about,” she said. “The emotion transcends the lyrical content, and people can relate to that.”

Lewis said she would never have believed when she started attending the Berkeley Folk Fest while she was growing up in Berkeley, Calif., that she would spend much of her life dedicated to the growth and revolution of folk and bluegrass. She has been part of the growing “newgrass” movement, which she says represents the genre’s attempt to keep up with the times.

“It synthesizes earlier styles and adds your own personal music melange to that,” she said. “There is always a changing of the bluegrass style for someone in the 21st century.”

For more than three decades, Lewis has been able to keep up with that change.