The Blues Wisdom in Song : Music: Legendary composer, bassist and singer Willie Dixon is among wealth of artists who will take the stage at Saturday’s festival in Costa Mesa.

If you have listened to popular music during the past 40 years, you’ve almost certainly heard a Willie Dixon song.

His classics are legion: “Back Door Man,” “Spoonful,” “Little Red Rooster,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “My Babe,” “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” and “The Seventh Son.”

Equally impressive are the performers who have recorded Dixon songs over the decades: Elvis Presley, Peggy Lee, Muddy Waters, Nancy Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Gil Evans, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and countless others.

Certainly too many for Dixon to keep track of. He admitted, for example, that he was unaware the Doors had recorded “Back Door Man.”

“I can’t listen to all the people that do my songs or I won’t have time to write,” says the 75-year-old composer, bassist and singer, who performs Saturday at the Benson & Hedges Blues ’91 festival at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

A North Hollywood resident for most of the last decade, Dixon estimates he still licenses four or five tunes a month, and says he’s almost always concocting a new song.

Dixon, who performs in public infrequently--”You get to the point where you don’t want to be out there all the time,” he says--will be accompanied Saturday by his Dream Band. (Also on the lineup are B. B. King, Gregg Allman, Johnny Winter, Etta James and John Campbell.)

Dixon’s Dream Band includes pianist Mose Allison, harmonica player Carey Bell Harrington, guitarist Cash McCall, drummer Al Duncan and guest bassist Rob Wasserman--mostly musicians who have recorded Dixon’s works.

“The idea is to get the musicians to do the songs their way and then I’ll come in and do a couple of different ones,” says Dixon in a deep, gravely voice that’s spotlighted on such recordings as “Hidden Charms,” the 1988 Grammy winner for traditional blues album, and 1989’s Dixon-composed soundtrack to the film, “Ginger Ale Afternoon.”

“The Dream Band is a good way to expose more of my songs,” he adds.

Perhaps the best known artist of the ensemble is Allison, a jazzman who has played with Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan and whose late ‘50s version of Dixon’s “The Seventh Son” has become a classic rendition.

Even Dixon--whose autobiography, “I Am the Blues,” was published last year by Da Capo Press--has heard that one.

“Mose was one of the first people to record that song, after it was first done by Willie Mabon,” recalls the composer. “He did a beautiful job with it, and he still does.”

Dixon, a native of Vicksburg, Miss., spent 50 years in Chicago before moving to Southern California in the early ‘80s. He began his recording career in 1940, but most of his well-known tunes were written in the ‘50s, and were recorded by such now-legendary blues men as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf on Chess Records, the label for which Dixon composed, produced and played bass off and on from 1951 until the early ‘60s.

At Chess, Dixon also played on many classic rock ‘n’ roll recordings, among them 20 of Chuck Berry’s early hits--from “Maybellene” and “Sweet Little Sixteen” to “Johnny B. Goode” and “Rock and Roll Music”--and Bo Diddley’s “Mona” and “Hey, Bo Diddley.”

Yet it wasn’t until 1969 and his “I Am the Blues” album that Dixon as a leader recorded his own versions of the songs that made him renowned as a composer.

Of his current activities, Dixon says first and foremost comes Blues Heaven, a nonprofit foundation that offers scholarships, donates instruments to high schools and assists songwriters in publishing, copyright protection and recovery of songwriting royalties.

Dixon says the ultimate aim of Blues Heaven is to preserve a place in American history for the blues, and for black blues musicians.

“The blues, which are the hidden history of black people in this country, have never been advertised and publicized like other music,” says Dixon. “So many people don’t know about the blues, don’t know they are the roots of so much American popular music.”

That could be, he says, because such exposure “might give the black people too much credit for what they had done.”

Dixon stresses that while the blues may have been the product of black Americans--though through the years there have always been some white blues artists--they speak to everyone.

“The blues are the actual facts of life,” he says. “They talk about everything. There’s wisdom in this music that gives everyone a better chance for the understanding of life.”

The Benson & Hedges Blues ’91 Festival with B.B. King, Etta James, Gregg Allman, Johnny Winter, John Campbell and the Willie Dixon Dream Band (with Willie Dixon, Mose Allison, Carey Bell, Al Duncan, Cash McCall, Joe Louis Walker and Rob Wasserman) is Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $19.25 to $27.50. Information: (714) 634-1300 (Ticketron).