Henry Butler is a big fan of the National Folk Festival.

The New Orleans stride pianist has previously performed three times at the event, and he will be bringing his Game Band to the National tonight through Sunday on the Bangor Waterfront.

“Aah, if there’s heaven on Earth,” he began. “I like these kinds of environments. It’s always great to hear that stuff live, to feel the spirit and creativity that goes into it. It shows the vast arrays of roots music that this country offers.”

Butler is kind of a one-man National Folk Festival himself. The fifty-something pianist, who coyly describes himself as “as old as God, and as young as eternity,” has been playing since age 8 and performing professionally since age 14. In that time, he has developed a mastery of jazz, funk, R&B, blues and stride-piano styles.

Butler is perhaps the king of keyboards in New Orleans. Dr. John, another who could certainly make a claim on that title, called him “the pride of New Orleans and a visionistical down-home cat and a hellified piano plunker to boot.”

So how did a blind boy from the projects develop into a world-renowned musician? It was a combination of natural talent and positive reinforcement along the way.

Butler began picking out chords on a neighbor’s piano at the tender age of 6, long before he discovered he had perfect pitch. They encouraged music at the Louisiana School for the Blind in Baton Rouge, which Butler attended, learning not only piano but also drums, baritone sax and valve trombone as well as arranging.

By the time he graduated high school, Butler knew that music was his life’s calling.

“By my junior and senior years, I knew I wanted to be a musician,” he recalled in a phone interview from New York City. “It certainly didn’t hurt that when I was a junior in high school, I was able to earn my own money, more than the other guys earned at their after-school jobs.”

With Braille scores hard to come by and few teachers equipped to teach blind students, Butler switched to vocal studies at Southern University, also in Baton Rouge. On weekends, he gigged with a series of local bands to keep up his piano studies. He went on to earn a master’s degree at Michigan State University.

With so many musicians earning their chops on the road, why did Butler emphasize higher education?

“I was really fortunate to have wonderfully caring, really astute teachers,” he explained. “During the time I was growing up in the South, there were separate environments for blacks and whites. People of color had to be sincere about education. They knew they had to be twice as good or better to get anything going. Our teachers understood that, and the environment was really intense. I knew that college had to be a part of the picture, at least up through getting a master’s.”

Butler first made his mark as a jazz musician from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s. Then he went home to New Orleans, and has been recording the blues ever since. He’s thrived in that genre, winning critical acclaim and earning four straight W.C. Handy Award nominations.

Through his growth as a performer, Butler learned from a stellar group of musicians, including Alvin Batiste, George Duke, McCoy Tyner and Professor Longhair.

The biggest lesson that he’s learned along the way is that there are no shortcuts to success.

“Work pays off,” he said. “Training pays off. Discipline pays off. Learning to observe pays off. Learning to have your mind control every part of your body pays off.”

That’s the main reason why he has taught music, beginning just after graduate school, at workshops and residencies across the country.

“I realized, in hindsight, that I was fortunate to have such good teachers,” he said. “After starting to teach, I knew that I had to find even more ways to contribute to the community I came from, the blind and visually impaired. The first workshop I did for blind kids confirmed that somebody needed to go in there and give some help. I’m certainly doing what I can.”

In addition to his teaching projects, Butler also hosts an annual summer camp for the blind and visually impaired at the University of New Orleans, where students share tips for living, compose and arrange music on computers, take dance and movement classes, and starting next year, learn to express themselves through theater.

“The mainstream education concept [where disabled students are placed into a school’s regular curriculum] doesn’t do a lot of good for blind people,” Butler said. “We get to see the lights go on when they’re sharing. Also, they get to do things that they don’t get much of in their normal schools.”

Butler shows blind youth what is possible not just through his career as a performer, arranger and composer, but also through his usual hobby – photography.

He, naturally, works with a camera in auto-focus mode. But his method of composing a photo has changed over the last 20 years.

“I used to wait for the urge before taking a picture,” he said. “But sometimes that takes a long time. Now I bring an assistant with me, who has an artistic eye and who I can relate to, to help with doing that. After they describe what we’re looking at, I decide whether to take the picture or not. I’m careful not to allow the assistant to do more than explain what’s there.”

Butler is looking forward to the crowds of 100,000 expected for the National Folk Festival. Large audiences are a plus for his show.

“Everybody is sort of an instrument,” he said. “I’m projecting musical consciousness, and the audience is taking it in, feeling it and sending it back to me. The more people there are, the more energy I have to work with. It’s an ebb and flow. It’s wonderful.”

Henry Butler and the Game Band will perform at 8 p.m. Friday at the Kenduskeag Dance Stage, at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Kenduskeag Dance Stage and 7:30 p.m. at the Railroad Stage, and at 4:15 p.m. Sunday (solo performance) at the Railroad Stage. Dale McGarrigle can be reached at 990-8028 and dmcgarrigle@bangordailynews.net.