The Isle of Man, a possession of the British crown, is not widely known for its bluesmen.

Most Americans know so little about this tiny, self-governing, water-encompassed country in the Irish Sea that they couldn’t even begin to surmise what might be giving its residents the blues.

But one Isle of Man axman who has made headlines in the states is here to report that the Isle of Man has a vibrant and varied music scene.

And it owes it all to herring.

“The fascinating thing about the Isle of Man is that it’s slap bang down in the middle of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” said Davy Knowles in a phone interview.

“Back in the day, there was huge fishing – herring fishing. So you’d get boats from all of those countries and other places coming to the Isle of Man, fishing around the waters and stopping in the Isle of Man.”

They’d all bring their songs. And Manx musicians (Manx being the name of the language and native people of the Isle of Man) would learn those songs and appropriate those songs and tweak those songs, he said.

So “there are a lot of great musicians” on the Isle of Man performing traditional Celtic music, blues and rock, Knowles said.

Knowles will play a mix of all three when he performs at C2G Music Hall on February 13.

But it wasn’t a Manx musician that inspired Knowles to take up the guitar.

It was Mark Knopfler.

Knowles’ dad had an expansive record collection and Knowles was poleaxed by the Dire Straits hit, “The Sultans of Swing.”

“My dad played me that tune when I was 10 years old,” he said. “I was totally hooked. (Knopfler’s guitar work is) just so melodic. You could sing every one of his solos.”

Later, his sister introduced him to the Irish bluesman Rory Gallagher and Knowles was brought closer to what would become his style of play.

“I really connected to him a lot because I could hear a lot of Celtic in his playing,” he said. “It was really cool to see this quite exotic American music being played by an Irishman and coming out slightly mid-Atlantic.

“The aggression of Rory’s playing really grabbed me,” Knowles said. “Between Rory Gallagher and Mark Knopfler is where I’d like to be.”

Knowles started gigging when he was 14, toured England when he was 15 and formed a band at 16 with some schoolmates called Back Door Slam.

The short-lived group played the SXSW Festival and toured the states twice before disbanding in 2009.

Knowles said his first U.S. tour was “astounding.”

“Just totally a dream come true,” he said. “Up to that point, we’d just been playing pubs, mainly on the Isle of Man. It was a hell of a big jump. It was quite daunting to go from playing in pubs to actually touring the United States. There were a lot of learning curves. I think that’s what ultimately shortened the life of that band.”

Knowles found himself opening for such guitar gods as Jeff Beck, Joe Satriani and Buddy Guy, which was both thrilling and nerve-wracking.

“Totally terrifying, yeah,” he said. “There’s part of you that’s a fan and is totally blown away. Everything seems very surreal. But there’s also that degree of, ‘Well, this is my job and I’d best get on with it.’ Practicality kicks in. It’s only after the fact that you think, ‘(Expletive). How lucky I am?’

“You try absorb as much as you can,” Knowles said. “They’ve been around a long time and are at the top of their craft and their game. They’re total inspirations and you’d be foolish not sit and take notes every night.”

Sharing a stage with legends is one thing. Collaborating with them is quite another.

A friend of Knowles who lived in Nashville shared his music with another musician and that was how Knowles came to be on the receiving end of a call one day from Peter Frampton.

“I got a phone call from him and he said, “Hey, I’ve been listening to your stuff and I like it a lot. We should get together,’” Knowles recalled. “And I’m thinking it’s a big practical joke.”

Eventually, tour breaks coincided and the men met up.

“We just hit it off,” Knowles said, “He’s such a lovely bloke. We just wrote and worked really well together.”

Because they’d co-written so many songs, Knowles asked Frampton to produce his next album.

“He was into the idea, thank God,” he said. “It all kind of fell into place quite nicely. What a joy he was to work with. A lovely, lovely man.”

These days, Knowles is based in Chicago, the home of the blues (or one of them).

He lives with his girlfriend who he met at one of his Windy City shows.

“I’d been on the radio and her folks dragged her down there,” he said. “She didn’t particularly want to go.”

One sad fact about contemporary Chicago is that its days as a blues mecca are long past.

Knowles said the blues scene is made up of “a very, very, very few elder statesmen – people like Luther ‘Guitar’ Johnson, Jimmy Burns and Buddy Guy. But there are very, very few people who are doing it with integrity, with a kind of old-fashioned spirit behind it.”

A lot of the blues that gets played in Chicago, he said, is equivalent to music performed by a rock cover band or tribute act: designed for undiscerning tourists.

And few African-American residents patronize the music, Knowles said.

“It is a very, very strange thing,” he said. “Not that I’m one to talk in any kind of way. But the audience is mostly white people – white, middle-aged people. Which is fine. If you like music, then (liking music is) the only thing that should be involved.

“But this is very much a black music adopted by other people,” Knowles said. “It’s kind of sad to see that not a lot of that is being embraced.”

Before the Internet robbed records and CDs of their profit-earning potential, success in the music business was easier to define but harder to achieve.

Of course, it’s never been easy to be a bluesman.

For Knowles, success “just means carrying on doing it.”

“I don’t want to be big pop star,” he said. “I just want to get better and better and keep enjoying it and be able to tour.”

There are certainly some unsavory conditions in the music business, Knowles said.

“But it’s no good complaining or grumbling about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the old days were like. I wasn’t there. This is the only time period I will know. I’ve got to make the most of it. There is a place for musicians rather than people who just want to be on the charts.”