Tommy Emmanuel's current CD is titled "Endless Road," and for good reason. On the phone from a hotel in St. Paul, where he's just played four days at the Minnesota State Fair and is about to travel to Seoul, South Korea, to perform at a jazz festival, he mentions that he played 330 shows last year.

Tommy Emmanuel With: Carol Lee Espy. Where: Carnegie Lecture Hall, Oakland, presented by Caliope House. When: Saturday, 8 p.m. Tickets: $25 advance, $27 at door; 412-432-0333.

The 50-year-old Australian solo guitarist-composer, whose country, folk and jazz super-chops decorate his dangerously catchy songs without words, grew up on the road, playing with his siblings in a band called The Midget Surfaries.

"I was born north of Sydney in a place called Musswellbrook," he says with an accent that would sound good in a Foster's beer commercial. "When I was about 3 years old we moved to a place called Gunnedah, and that's where we started playing music."

With Tommy on rhythm guitar, Phil on lead, Chris on drums and Virginia on Hawaiian lap steel guitar, the Surfaries played instrumentals, covering the Ventures, the Shadows and Duane Eddy.

"We played halls and band competitions, and we did TV and radio and sideshows, kind of, and circus-type places, followed the circuit. In 1960, we sold everything up and bought two cars and a tent and a trailer and hit the road, and we stayed on the road until 1965."

That's when Mr. Emmanuel's father took sick and died. "We joined a traveling show and went back on the road again, but the child welfare department didn't believe that we were getting the proper education, so they forced us off the road. We settled in a little place called Parks, which is where the big radio telescope is that beams the images of men walking on the moon."

By the time he was 15, Mr. Emmanuel was ready to move on.

"I handed in my books one day and went home and told my mum I was leaving the next day, and that was it. I took off. I went to Sydney to further my career. I had things I wanted to do, and school was doing nothing for me, really." His mother was "very upset," he remembers. "Down the track a piece, she forgave me."

And no wonder. Mr. Emmanuel became a star in his native country playing instrumental music, sometimes with his older brother Phil. His hits included 1993's electric guitar piece "The Journey," and a tune played on nylon-string guitar, "Since We Met."

"Also I had a couple of TV themes going. The first TV theme that I wrote was back in 1976, and it played for seven years twice a week. So people got to know who wrote that and who played it and all that kind of stuff. It was called 'Country Wide.' The show was about people on the land, unusual Australian characters."

Mr. Emmanuel drew inspiration for his successful musical style from a number of far-flung wells, but the deepest of those was the late Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins, famous for his "chick-boom" thumb-pick-and-fingers style of playing.

"After my dad passed away, I was 11 years old. I kind of retreated into a world of listening to his [Atkins'] music everyday. I got so fascinated by it that I looked on the back of one the albums and there was an address for RCA Records, Music Row, Nashville. So I wrote a letter to him, and he wrote back to me. And then when I was about 18, a friend of mine sent a tape of me over to Chet without telling me, and I get this letter out of the blue from Chet, saying if you come to Nashville, let's hook up.

"So in 1980, I made the pilgrimage to Nashville and went to his office and we hung out all afternoon. Lenny Breau [the late jazz and country guitarist] was there as well, and the three of us played for hours and hours; the day just went by. And we just stayed in touch."

Atkins played on a track on Mr. Emmanuel's "The Journey" album in 1993. In the late '90s, Atkins and Mr. Emmanuel recorded an entire CD of duets, "The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World."

Onstage, Mr. Emmanuel is a spark plug, standing up while he plays his acoustic guitar. "I boogie around. I dance around and keep the groove."

He's apt to play anything from a Beatles medley to Merle Travis' "Nine Pound Hammer," as well as his originals, often with titles that reflect his globe-trotting: "Mombasa," "Train to Dusseldorf," "Borsalino." His pop-influenced song craft is one of the qualities that distinguishes Mr. Emmanuel. The jaw-dropping guitar licks are always draped around memorable melodies and harmonies.

"Melody is everything," he says. "Without a good song, you've got nothin'. You can be the most dazzling technical person and bore people to death if you don't play something that really touches them. And I'm always trying to write a song that, when people hear it, they want to sing along with it or they want to put a lyric to it. I always tell people, 'Don't go out and listen to other guitar players. Listen to good songwriters. Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder and James Taylor. Have a listen to the way their songs are constructed and the melodies and stuff like that.' "

As for the rigors of touring, Mr. Emmanuel doesn't seem to notice.

"It's just part of what I do, and I meet people all the time, you never know who you're going to meet and what's going to happen. I carry a guitar in a zip bag on my back all the time. I check two of them in with the luggage but I always carry one with me, and I always end up playing in lounges. When I'm traveling a lot and I've got to wait for planes, that's a good time to practice."

But surely touring 330 days a year must wear a person down -- the rush to the airport, the road food and, in his case, a fiancee waiting at home in Nashville, where he now lives.

"Um, no, I don't know. I, uh, I'm built of something else." He laughs. "Because people just can't keep up with me and can't understand how I can do it. Even people I know who are pretty tough cookies themselves, they still don't understand how I do it. It's important to me because I feel I'm doing some good work here on this planet, and while I'm alive I want to do the best that I can. And my job's a great job. When I play, something happens to people. And that's what I'm out there for."