Buck Evans always liked old songs. He liked watching Westerns back in the '50s growing up, not because of the action, but because of the music.

"What I always liked was the scene in the saloon. There'd be a piano player and I thought that was real neat,"' he said.

He was also drawn to "Mighty Joe Young" (1949) and "The Public Enemy" (1931) because they featured ragtime piano players in them.

Evans didn't set out to be a piano player, he was merely interested in listening and had a knack for singing, but gradually he gravitated toward the instrument.

"(Growing up) I didn't have a piano, but I had a good sense of solfeggio, I always sang songs. I ended up meeting a lot of piano players," Evans said. "Then I'd go to some basements in churches to practice until they would kick me out."

He took lessons from the wife of the preacher - which didn't really work out - so he learned to play boogie-woogies instead.

"You know, three-chord stuff," he said.

But Evans was always drawn to the old music, basically Dixieland and ragtime, by players such as Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake.

After leaving home and drifting around some, Evans ended up in New Orleans where he honed his skills as a Dixieland musician.

"I was working six days a week, wearing a blue suit and all this stuff," he said. "I had a good ear and I was actually faking the whole thing. I was just hearing whatever they were doing and trying to go along with it, but they didn't know that. They just assumed I knew all these numbers, so it worked out all right."

Evans came to Alaska the first time in 1972, arriving in the middle of winter via ferry from Prince Rupert. The fare was $29 back then.

"I had a little affair with somebody in Prince Rupert and I had to get out of there 'cause her husband was coming back," he said. "I had no intention of going to Alaska at all, certainly, not on the 10th of January. So the whole thing is complete happenstance, complete accident."

Evans' first gig in Juneau was at the Occidental Bar on South Franklin Street (which is now a jewelry store). He soon started playing at the Red Dog Saloon in its old location on North Franklin (which is now a fur store).

"The Red Dog was more of a local bar," he said. "Obviously it always had this inundation of tourists, but it was also a local bar and the ambiance was that the tourists would come in and talk to the locals."

Juneau was a looser town back then, he said. "People stayed out of everybody else's business. You didn't have some moron telling you how to live your life or legislating how you're going to live your life. I must say that was an extraordinary era. ... It was a much funkier place," he said.

Evans has traveled in and out of Juneau since then, performing as the honky-tonk piano player in the "Days of '98"' show in Skagway for many years and for silent movies in Portland and Seattle. He's performed in Canada and Australia, the Bahamas and in Majorca, Spain. He's played on Mississippi riverboats, cruise ships along the Inside Passage and with big bands in Seattle.

Today Evans performs at the Red Dog Saloon most weekdays. He doesn't categorize his music into any one genre, but says it resembles swing and honky-tonk. A typical set will feature songs by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin, as well as songs by less recognized composers like Walter Donaldson and Ray Henderson.

Evans writes and performs his own music as well. His CD compilation "Nize Baby," features songs written in a 1920s style. One of them, "Albania," was recently featured on an episode of the television show "Greek." The CD is for sale at the Red Dog Saloon.

It's odd that he makes his living as a performer, Evans said, because he's basically a shy person.

"I'm practically a hermit. I'm not the life of the party. I don't particularly care for people. ... So (when I'm playing) I'm thinking how humorous this is and I'll occasionally start laughing because it so ridiculous," he said.

Ridiculous or not, Buck Evans is a virtuoso piano player who keeps an encyclopedia of musical knowledge in his head, and has mastered playing songs in all keys. Tourists passing through the swinging doors at the Red Dog have asked if the man on the stage is really playing or just faking it and moving his hands over the keys of a player piano.

"There's some great songs to do and I daresay I get some funny looks when I play them because nobody expects to walk into a tourist place and hear somebody playing anything like that," Evans said. "And that's sort of fun."

• Teri Tibbett is a writer and musicianliving in Juneau. She can be reached at www.tibbett.com.