The long tour bus brakes at the gate with a loud grunt, late in the afternoon on an unusually chilly day for Jacksonville, Florida. Guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi, step out, looking slightly bushed after the 12-hour drive from Washington, D.C. — they performed at the Southern Inaugural Ball for Barack Obama the night before — and walk briskly up the driveway to their two- story house, into the arms of an ecstatic welcoming committee: their children, Charlie, 6, and Sophia, 4.

A happy chaos quickly breaks out as the rest of the Derek Trucks Band and crew spill out of the bus, including Trucks' father, Chris, who mans the merchandise table, and his younger brother Duane, a drummer. Derek is soon in the backyard, playing football with Charlie — Derek's long blond ponytail bounces against his back as he chases his son around the palm and orange trees — while Derek's mother, Debbie, who helps with the children, keeps an adoring eye on Sophia as the tiny dynamo joins the scrimmage. Later, there is a group expedition down a long dock that winds from the yard through swampy brush out to Durbin Creek, where there is good fishing, manatees swim by and a local alligator often suns himself on a nearby tangle of exposed tree roots.

This is a rare treat for the kids and their hard-touring parents: all four at home at the same time. Trucks and Tedeschi, who met in 1999 and married two years later, spend up to 300 days a year on the road, most of them apart. A slide-guitar prodigy at nine, Trucks was leading his own band by his early teens. Since 1999, he has also been a member of the Allman Brothers Band, playing with his dad's older brother, drummer Butch Trucks. There was also the year, in 2006 and 2007, that Trucks spent touring in Eric Clapton's band — a kind of homecoming, as Trucks is named after Derek and the Dominos, Clapton's short-lived band with the Allmans' founding guitarist, Duane Allman, who died in 1971.

"I knew I was a lifer 15 years ago," Trucks, now 29, says with a grin, then a shrug. He recalls the way he spent what should have been his high school years — "playing every shitty bar from coast to coast, three times a year, to the point where we'd pull in somewhere and go, 'Hey, this is scary. I've been to this gas station. I know this Waffle House.'"

Tedeschi, 38, is a blues-guitar star in her own right, a multiple Grammy nominee who sings with the combined grit and smolder of Bonnie Bramlett and Janis Joplin and tours extensively with her own band. When their schedules align, Tedeschi — who has chestnut-brown hair and a bright, welcoming smile — does shows with Trucks in their classic-R&B revue, the Soul Stew Revival. "This is what I asked for as a child," she says with delight, sitting on a bench in the backyard. "I'd pray, 'I want to have a family and play music.'" She beams as Charlie and Sophia zoom by on kiddie bikes. "I've had a lot of dreams. And since I've been with Derek, I've seen a lot of them come to fruition."

But only a few hours after they get off that tour bus, following a big family dinner at a neighborhood restaurant and the kids' long march to bedtime, Trucks and Tedeschi go right back to work — at Swamp Raga Studios, a two-story recording and practice haven they built behind the house two years ago. Trucks says Swamp Raga, which includes a guest bedroom and listening lounge upstairs, cost $400,000, twice the initial budget. But the expense has already paid off. Trucks produced his band's new studio album and first Top 20 hit, Already Free — a strong brew of original songwriting and inspired cover choices (Big Maybelle, Basement Tapes-era Bob Dylan), steeped in back-country blues and funk — here.

Tonight, Trucks, Tedeschi and Trucks' long-serving band — bassist Todd Smallie, keyboard player Kofi Burbridge, singer Mike Mattison, percussionist Count M'Butu and drummer Yonrico Scott, with Duane Trucks on a second kit — rehearse at Swamp Raga for several hours, working on muscular electric-soul versions of Delaney and Bonnie, Joe Cocker and Curtis Mayfield songs, as well as Tedeschi's own "Talking About," from her fine recent album, Back to the River. At one point, during Cocker's "Space Captain," Trucks — sitting frozen in a chair except for his hands, watching them move on his Gibson SG with divinity-student absorption — uncorks a spectacular slide break, a euphoric succession of hard skids and single-note quivers with overlapping flashes of blues, modal jazz and Indian classical music.