This is a guitar town. And last Saturday there was an abundance of interesting guitarists at local venues, including Aubrey Ghent, Kaki King, Susan Tedeschi, and Robin Lane & the Chartbusters. Ghent and King, two of the night’s most esoteric players, beckoned the loudest. And though I eventually headed over to the House of Blues to see King, catching Ghent made it possible to hear part of Tedeschi’s performance, since she’d hand-picked the Florida Pentecostal minister to open her latest homecoming concert, at the Orpheum.

Ghent plays a style of religious music based on lap slide guitar that’s known as " sacred steel. " Within a few tunes the bespectacled, portly reverend’s quintet had the Orpheum’s stage radiating the same joyful vibrations as at a gospel tent show. It was impossible to resist the high, keening, happy tone of Ghent’s zippy thumb-picked six-string steel guitar and his group’s powerful three-part harmonies. Ghent is not quite a virtuoso, since he limits his playing to single-string picking, but his bold tone has its own winning presence — whether he’s duplicating the vocal melody of a standard like " Just a Closer Walk with Thee " or imitating the sound of a steam locomotive on " Train Don’t Leave Me. " And as he solo’d deliriously on " Don’t Let the Devil Ride, " just after giving notice that " if you let him ride, he’s gonna want to drive, " he danced a little jig that charmed the crowd even more.

Tedeschi is, of course, a home-town heroine. Within two albums and as many Grammy nominations, the singer with the warm unrefined honey voice has evolved from a blues-rocker into a more soulful performer with a wide grasp of styles. As her recent Wait for Me (Tone-Cool) and a show with B.B. King at the FleetBoston Pavilion last fall proved, she’s also become a guitarist capable of tough biting solos that hit their apex when they approximate the fat-toned declarations of the late Johnny " Guitar " Watson. But in the first 45 minutes of her Orpheum set, Tedeschi’s guitar chemistry seemed a bit off — especially when she reached up her Telecaster’s neck to conclude a solo on " Wait for Me " with screaming high notes and hit a clam that made it skid to a close. That said, her roiling low-register riffs on " I Fell in Love " rocked like Jimmy Vaughan.

It was unfair to leave Tedeschi’s set at that point, but just down the Red Line in Harvard Square, Kaki King was about to take the House of Blues stage. The 23-year-old newcomer, who seems only slightly larger than her Ovation guitar, is a budding phenomenon. Playing material from her new album (see " Off the Record, " on page 28), she won an audience there for prog-rock headliner Tony Levin with a technique that wove two-handed tapping, thumb slaps, wicked right-hand picking, palm slides, and deliberate whacks into an aggressive yet lyrical style.