As laptop DJs blare radio “hitz” and doormen hock suspect drink specials on every corner, most Austinites on Dirty Sixth are unlikely to stumble across enlightenment or soul.

Gary Clark Jr. is not most Austinites.

Over the past few years, Austin’s guitar great has become a superstar on the international festival circuit, but in 2014 he slowed his tour schedule and returned to his hometown for nearly a year to record his new album, “The Story of Sonny Boy Slim,” at Arlyn Studios in South Austin.

At the end of one night he found himself walking down Sixth Street. He had his headphones on, trying to sort out lyrics in his mind, when he was stopped by Christopher Copeland, an older gentleman, fatigued by a life spent on and off the streets.

“Hey man I’ve been seeing you. You’re doing your thing out here,” Clark remembers him saying. “Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s important and you’re a soldier out here.” Then he began to sing an old spiritual, “Hard Fighting Soldier.”

“I’m a hard fighting solider and I’m on the battlefield.

“Lord, I’m a hard fighting soldier and I’m on the battlefield.”

It was a strange time for Clark. His fiancee, Nicole Trunfio, was pregnant with his son. He was feeling creative and inspired but nervous about the future. The country was erupting with racial strife. Ferguson, Baltimore, it all weighed heavy on his mind. He was trying to process it the only way he knows, through music.

At the same time he was preparing to meet his child. He was haunted by the beautiful, terrifying sensation of formless, unfathomable love every parent knows. It affected everything. “Everything had to mean something. Every note that I played. Every lyric that I sang. Every note,” Clark says. “It had to really mean something, otherwise it wasn’t worth doing it.”

He had been meditating on the healing power of music, an idea that would become the guiding concept for the album. When Copeland started to sing on that dark, liquor-soaked street, something stirred. Clark, who was raised in the church, began to sing along, providing quiet, graceful harmonies to Copeland’s world-worn lead.

“I’m a hard fighting soldier and I’m on the battlefield.

“I keep bringing souls to Jesus, by the service.”

Clark took out his phone and there, on Austin’s avenue of stale vomit and endless regret, where sin trumps salvation every time, he recorded the religious invocation that would introduce the new album.

Clark’s ability to summon soul on Sixth is tied to his musical roots on the street. As a young teenager, he got his start playing blues jams at the shuttered dive Joe’s Generic Bar and the somewhat more respectable club Babe’s (now Friends). Later he would play gigs at the Austin branch of the Hard Rock Cafe chain (now Recess), where his first taste of success was selling out copies of the demo CD his parents helped him produce.

Initially his folks accompanied him to all gigs, but soon he found the supervised visits were not enough to satiate his appetite for live music. Among his friends he earned the name “Hotwire” by slipping off with his mom’s car after his folks were asleep. “He was sneaking out the house, going down to Antone’s to hear bands, and I’m snoozing,” Gary Clark Sr. says.

The clandestine nights at Antone’s were formative for Clark. He tapped the knowledge of local greats Jimmie Vaughan and Doyle Bramhall II and soaked up the sounds of visiting blues legends. He credits club owner Clifford Antone as a driving force in his career. “I wouldn’t have the musical education, the knowledge, if it wasn’t for that guy who allowed me to hang backstage with Hubert Sumlin and Pinetop Perkins and James Cotton, these guys telling me stories… and then (to) go listen to and really be able to feel it,” Clark says.

The seasoned blues men were similarly impressed by the young gun who was so serious about learning their craft. “What I remember so clearly is that the older guys, older blues musicians were just so awed by Gary and thought he was so great,” Susan Antone, Clifford’s sister, says.

Early on Clark was approached by small labels and management teams, but his parents were wary and hired a lawyer to review contracts that didn’t add up. Clark wasn’t ready to sign anyway. “He also didn’t think he was good enough,” his mother, Sandi Clark, says. “He was like, ‘I’ve got so much to learn.’”

When Clark graduated from Austin High School, he turned down a full-ride scholarship to study music at the University of Texas and instead threw himself into playing full time. By July 2003, when he was just 19, he landed at the Continental Club for the weekly Wednesday happy-hour residency he would hold for three years. During that time his talent blossomed.

He started as a one-man show, alone on the stage with his guitar and his voice. Sometimes he used a harmonica rack. He put a tack in his shoe and used a stomp board for percussion. He’d play acoustic guitar and sing, paying homage to the old-school blues tradition. Then he would switch to electric, an unusual move for a soloist, but Clark pulled it off. He was riveting, but also painfully shy.

“When he would play, he always had his eyes closed, and when he’d finish his song, he’d look up really quick and then look down again,” Dianne Scott, the club’s longtime publicist, says.

Even in the beginning, Scott knew there was something special about Clark. He had the fire, the magic. He was writing prolifically and his set rapidly developed from covers to original material. His solo act grew into a trio with Jay Moeller on drums and James Bullard on bass, and the additional players helped him relax.

Scott raved about Clark in the Continental Confidential, the club’s long-running email newsletter. “Gary is the real deal, and you’ll want to be able to say you ‘knew him when…’,” she wrote for the first time in October 2003. It was a refrain she’d repeat. Folks listened. Crowds at the club swelled.

“It got to the point where it was standing room only,” Sandi Clark says. “Steve (Wertheimer, the club’s owner) said to me one night, ‘I know I’m not going to be able to keep him here much longer.’”

The end of the run came in 2006. At the request of Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black, Scott introduced Clark to director John Sayles at the Continental Club one night. Sayles would cast Clark as the lead in the film “Honeydripper,” a story about a young blues guitarist. Excitement around Clark was building, but buzz doesn’t pay the bills. After the film wrapped he returned to Austin. Over the next few years he managed to eke out a living playing gigs at clubs around town, but money was tight. He was too proud to ask for help, so his mother would sometimes show up at his house unannounced with groceries or gas money. “Starving artist, that was Gary,” she says.

In 2010, organist Mike Flanigin briefly did a duo gig with Clark at Vino Vino, a wine bar on Guadalupe Street. “I remember we had like no attendance,” he says. “And then Gary, he had to take one week off, I remember, to go to the Crossroads Festival in Chicago.”

Everything was about to change.

Clark’s longtime friend, Doyle Bramhall II, was a frequent collaborator of Eric Clapton and passed Clark’s demo to Clapton, who hand-selected him as the only newcomer to play his Crossroads Guitar Festival that year. Clark dropped a scorching cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.” The 26-year-old guitar wiz was the talk of the event. For Clark, the experience was emotional and surreal.

“It was just really humbling to him that he was onstage with so many of his idols and he said, ‘Mom, I didn’t have a dime in my pocket,’” Sandi Clark says.

Shortly after the festival, Clark signed to Warner Bros. Records and released the “Bright Lights” EP. His mother says when he received his first royalties check, he cried.