Jorma Kaukonen is nine-years sober. He’s made it through more than 40 years of hard rock ’n’ roll living.

At 65, he seems content. He spends half his time touring the country playing the music he loves to adoring fans. The other half he spends in Ohio at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains, where he and his wife Vanessa operate the Fur Peace Ranch, something of a low-key resort for the guitar enthusiast, where he and an all-star faculty teach guitar in a small group setting.

He’s got a baby on the way, and a newfound outlook.

If you don’t know the name Jorma Kaukonen, the lead guitarist for Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, you’re not alone.

In the pantheon of the rock gods, Jorma (pronounced Yorma) is one of those guitar-playing deities who, while universally respected and revered by his peers, is not a household name.

He’s ranked in the top two-thirds of Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the best 100 guitar players ever. It was his playing that helped lay the soundtrack for the late ’60s and the countercultural revolution. If there is such thing as a rock-and-blues virtuoso, Kaukonen is it. He’s been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And he’s been nominated for a Grammy. So, if you don’t know who he is, it’s worth finding out.

But discovering Jorma is not just a job for the rock fan. During the past few years, Jorma has found it a job for himself. He is Jewish, and he is only now starting to discover what that means to him.

If Jorma doesn’t sound like a Jewish name, that’s because it’s not. While his mother, Beatrice Love, was Jewish, his father, Jorma Sr., was a non-Jewish Finn. An FBI, and later a State Department, man, Jorma Sr. spent much of his son’s childhood moving the family from exotic location to exotic location. Though their home base was Washington, D.C., where the junior Jorma attended Woodrow Wilson High School, they spent much of Jorma’s childhood in places such as the Philippines and Pakistan.

Growing up in Washington, especially, Jorma knew that he was Jewish. It was something that made him an outsider. While the black kids were the obvious outsiders when Woodrow Wilson High School was integrated in 1954, "the people who existed outside the pale were the Jewish kids," he said.

But "Jewish" had no spiritual or religious meaning for him.

At Chanukah, his family would have a menorah and perhaps a dreidel, but that was about it in terms of practice. There was no synagogue attendance. And while he realized later that the foods he ate with his mother’s side of the family were all Jewish — "Matzoh was my favorite cracker when I was a kid," he recalled — he didn’t recognize anything about himself as Jewish.