Few area musicians illustrate the old adage, "When life gives you lemons make lemonade" as vividly as Austin "Walkin' Cane" Charanghat. The blues singer-guitarist was born with a malformation of the blood vessels in one leg, which sidelined him for long stretches in high school. His response was to spend all his time playing guitar. "That's when a lot of good things started happening on my end," he says. "I started getting good. Practicing all day long you can't help it."

Despite the eventual amputation of that leg in 1996, Charanhat has parlayed his one-time misery and his love of the blues into a full-time career that's resulted in six albums as Walkin' Cane or the Walkin' Cane Band, five of them since 2001. He'll be releasing the latest one, Murder of a Blues Singer, this Saturday, March 15 with three sets in a single evening. He plays from 5-7 p.m. solo at the Old Angle Tavern, where he's been doing Saturdays for three years. And he also plays from 9:30-10:30 p.m. solo and 11 p.m.-12:30 a.m. with his electric band (guitarist Michael Bay, drummer Jim Wall and Eric Sosinski on bass) at the Parkview. It's symbolic of how hard he's worked to become one of the area's high-profile musicians.

Charangat discovered the blues in high school, thanks to the classic rockers he and friends were into, and the music really resonated with him with its tales of persevering in the face of woe. "We'd all gotten into the Stones and the Who and the Beatles; the Stones and Clapton would always talk about the various blues guys like Albert King, Robert Johnson, Freddie King, so I started reading about them and buying their records," he says. "The music was pretty amazing to me. I love the vocals; I love the style of guitar playing. Especially back then, that's what I listened to all day long. Once in a while I would drift off into something else but I would always come back to blues."

In fact, Charanghat spent 10 years playing classic rock with the Skydogs until 1995, when he started the Walkin' Cane Band in order to play the music he really loved.

"I still had my leg at that point, but it was giving me all sorts of trouble," he recalls. "I was dealing with that, and the excesses of being a musician didn't help any. I was young, I was trying to get my life together and it didn't seem like it was going in the right direction. Primarily I was miserable because of my leg. At 26, I broke it the last time and that was the end of that. I said, nice working with you, I'm done. A couple of months later I had it cut off. I got my skin tone back. I was a lot healthier. After that I started to focus a little bette, too."

In a sense, Murder of a Blues Singer marks a transition for Charanghat. He's been easing into a solo career, biding farewell to his longtime band, bassist Mike Barrick, Jim Wall and Michael Bay. They play on the electric-blues cuts on the disc, such as "Devil's Backbone" and "Hold in the Night."

"Some songs needed to have band, some needed to be me by myself," he says. "I gave them the tunes about a week before, we rehearsed once, went in and recorded it. I wanted the completely spontaneous, loose feeling you get because nobody really knows the tunes. It captured the whole essence of blues in my opinion, just raw. It was a testament to those guys, their talent. We winged right through it, did maybe two takes."

Other tunes, such as "High Rent Lemon Girl, Aren't Ya?," and his version of Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" showcase Charanghat solo, filled with the lonely simplicity of country blues. On the latter the sparseness is softened by voices from the Prayer Warriors. Colin Dussault adds harmonica to another pair of the lean acoustic tunes, a reworking of Cleveland pop-rock band Rosavelt's "Late Great Singer" and Robert Johnson's "Ramblin' on my Mind," offered in tribute to the late Robert Jr. Lockwood.

"Lockwood was going to play on this record," says Charanghat. "Unfortunately, he passed a month before we were going to go in the studio. I was listening to his stuff after he passed, and on "Rambling on my Mind,'" he did some great guitar stuff. I learned it and did a little tribute to him. He was the only real legend to be part of Cleveland. There's a lot of great guys from Cleveland but he was the link to the old school."

His relationship with Rosavelt leader Chris Allen goes back to first grade. In fact, Allen co-wrote six of the new disc's 10 tracks in addition to "Late Great Singer."

"We've been friends for a long time," Charanghat says. "When we were kids, I had a four-track machine in my bedroom. Chris would come over whenever he had something going on in his head and needed to put it down on tape. I was working on some new tunes one day and I was stuck on this one line. I was going to meet Chris anyway, so I showed it to him and in a minute he spat out something that was perfect. After that we started doing stuff all the time. I put a little different spin on ["Late Great Singer']. Around Cleveland a lot of people know that song; they've heard Chris play it and expect to hear his version. Blues people go, "wow, what is that song?'"

Walkin' Cane's career started to shift in 2003 with the release of 706 Union Ave. which he recorded "in an hour" at Sun Studios in Memphis, immediately following his wedding ceremony there.

"People started to call me to see if I'd perform solo; that started to take over. I always kept the band working on weekends, and they always had jam night on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We had a good run with the band, about 10 years."

Recently, Charanghat has broken into the NACA (National Association of College Activities) circuit, adding extensive college gigs to his schedule. Acceptance at one of its regional conferences led to 20 such gigs; he was accepted at two more, including one in Philadelphia last weekend and an upcoming one in St. Paul, Minnesota.

As a result, "This past month, I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Joliet, Illinois; Matoon, Illinois; Kenosha, Racine, Elkhorn and Milwaukee.

"That's a whole new spin," he says, describing how he's become a sort of blues ambassador as well as performer. "I'm taking a different approach where I introduce different blues players, taking it from New Orleans up the Delta to Chicago, playing different songs by players, whoever pops into my head, incorporating my stuff in there as well. A lot of college kids get to hear artists they maybe didn't know about. It's been working out well so far."

Austin "Walkin' Cane" Charangat: 5-7 p.m. Saturday, March 15 at Old Angle Tavern, 1848 W. 25th St., 216.861.5643.

And 9:30 p.m. Saturday, March 15, Parkview Nite Club, 1261 W. 58th St., 216.961.1341.