Walk the neck to the next note, to transistor radios around the country jumping to life with the sound of pale English boys singing the troubles of black men from the Mississippi Delta, to traditional blues and driving guitar rock joined in holy matrimony by the likes of John Mayall and Peter Green and Eric Clapton.

Find the next note a half-step up and hold it, hold it, hold it long enough for Carroll, now in college on the other side of the country, to sit back and watch the parade of original blues legends — Muddy Waters and B.B. King and John Lee Hooker — making their way up and down the West Coast circuit in the late '60s.

Feel the sympathetic vibrations rise in his belly and notes that will resonate 30 years later and an entire ocean away.

"My first response (to blues music) was visceral," says Carroll, an English professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

CARROLL'S PICKS Music "If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em as You Please" by Mike Bloomfield; Kicking Mule "Deep Blues" Soundtrack; Atlantic "I Was Walking Through the Woods" by Buddy Guy; Chess "Vietnam Blues" by J.B. Lenoir; Evidence "Blues With a Feeling" by Little Walter; Chess "Hoodoo Lady" by Memphis Minnie; Columbia/Legacy "Founder of the Delta Blues" by Charley Patton; Yazoo "Right Place, Wrong Time" by Otis Rush; Hightone "The Chess Box" by Muddy Waters; Chess "Essential" by Sonny Boy Williamson; Chess Books "Nothing But the Blues" edited by Laurence Cohn; Abbeville "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism" by Angela Davis; Pantheon "The World Don't Owe Me Nothing" by David "Honeyboy" Edwards; Chicago Review "Blues In the Delta" by William Ferris; Da Capo "Love in Vain" by Alan Greenberg; Da Capo "The Land Where the Blues Began" by Alan Lomax; New Press "Stomping the Blues" by Albert Murray; Vintage "The Voice of the Blues" edited by Jim O'Neal and Amy van Singel; Routledge "Blues Fell This Morning" by Paul Oliver; Cambridge "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer; Penguin Film "Robert Mugge's Deep Blues" (1991) is "far and away the best film ever made about the blues; sadly, nearly all of its participants have passed away in the dozen years since it was made."

Carroll has done much thinking about the blues since then, some of the results of which can be found in his book.

"When Your Way Gets Dark" (Parlor Press, $27 paper, $54 cloth, $12 e-book) takes its title from a Charlie Patton song. It is an ambitious examination not just of blues as a musical form, but of its qualities as a style of communication, and its social, political and cultural implications.

"It's about a long-term series of encounters with a form of American music that is beautiful and profound and that tends to drop under the radar because of more popular, more radio-friendly music forms," Carroll says. "I have a kind of mission to recover it or draw it back into view."

Carroll recognized the untapped potential in the blues as a source of academic inquiry. And he is as suited as anyone to take up that challenge. In addition to this latest book, he's authored a novel and two textbooks on writing and his writings on composition and rhetoric are widely published.

Carroll's credentials as a blues lover are just as impeccable. He grew up listening to his father's Benny Goodman and Count Basie 78s, then moved on, as many baby boomers did, to the electric blues-heavy rock that defined FM radio in the 1960s.

But it was seeing close-up Waters, King, Hooker and other traditional bluesmen, championed by an appreciative new wave of English players, as an undergraduate at Reed College in Oregon that was truly revelatory.

"I loved the blues aspect of rock 'n' roll, but it was pure blues that I fell in love with shortly after," Carroll says. "The originators were coming in right behind the interpreters. It was a sort of backward movement for me."

Still, Carroll's love for the blues didn't strongly cross over into his scholarly pursuits until a September night in 1994 when he and a couple of friends took in an Otis Rush show on the north side of Chicago.

At that show, Carroll writes, he first began to reflect on the performance of blues as a rhetorical act — "a language-use that is consciously constructed, and which aims at an audience whose expectations are primarily affective, and whose understanding of this rhetoric is contextualized culturally."

And while linking Robert Johnson, Skip James and Charlie Patton to a rhetorical tradition better known for the contributions of Aristotle, Plato and Quintilian might seem like an exercise in academic smoke and mirrors, Carroll meticulously — and accessibly — draws the connections, incorporating ideas from contemporary rhetoric scholars Kenneth Burke and Richard Weaver, blues writers like Alan Lomax and Charles Keil, black writers and essayists including Ralph Ellison, post-colonial scholars like Homi Bhabha, and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

"I think it's a challenge, if you love the object of your study, to communicate that but not as the end thing or the purpose," Carroll says. "There's got to be an analytical mode that's productive, too."

At the same time, Carroll says, "I'm reticent to just do theory or criticism because it is an intellectual exercise that can remove you from the object."

A balance is achieved in "When Your Way Gets Dark." Carroll serves as witness to classic blues performances and chronicles his attempts to study his subject, then uses these experiences as springboards for analysis.

Carroll argues that just as issues surrounding jazz and hip-hop have been embraced by academia, the blues can be appreciated for what it says about a distinct cultural history and experience.

And while the book itself is a feat of scholarship, the author's affection for his subject will likely be a key factor in its attraction to a broader audience.

"I thought that, in a way, (this book) was honoring of the form, not just to enjoy unreflectively but to find a way to reflect on it," Carroll says.

"In some ways, this book is a kind of narrative of my figuring out ways to get at the meaning of the music beyond its sensory pleasures."