Oct. 13, 2020

Grant Dermody interview

Grant Dermody interview
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Season 1 Diatonic Harmonica Blues Harmonica Chromatic Blues

Grant Dermody first picked up the harp in Alaska, where he emulated the greats before developing his own acoustic sound playing American roots music. 
He played as a session man on various albums before releasing the first of his four solo albums to date, which included harmonica duets with Phll Wiggins and Joe Filisko. In-between Grant toured for six years with Eric Bibb, and for his latest album, My Dony, he has returned to his roots with a raucous electrified harmonica sound. Not only a great harmonica player with a strong sense of rhythm, Grant is a vocalist, and has penned the lyrics on many of the songs on his albums. On top of all this, Grant is a passionate teacher of the harmonica. 


Select the Chapter Markers tab above to select different sections of the podcast (website version only).

Links:
Grant's website:
https://www.grantdermody.com/

Discography:
https://www.grantdermody.com/discography/

Teaching:
https://www.grantdermody.com/teaching/


YouTube:
Harmonica duet with Joe Filisko:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWZjtbNmyUc&feature=youtu.be

EuroBlues Week Harmonica Tutor intro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQRu2kEyok&feature=youtu.be

Jerry Devillier playing Cajun Harmonica:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptNsv7s7or8


Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.com/

Support the show

01:12 - Grant had to flee from current Hurricane ‘Delta'

01:52 - Grew up in Seattle but learned harmonica in Alaska

02:14 - Grant’s father gave Grant his first harmonica at age 18

02:46 - Started playing harmonica in Fairbanks, Alaska

03:19 - Learned to play a different range of styles during those early days

04:13 - Got some tips from a guy he met walking down the street

04:39 - Friend put Grant onto Little Walter and Charlie Musselwhite

06:02 - Slim Harpo was an early inspiration

07:22 - Grant developed an interest in acoustic style

08:21 - Started learning to play fiddle tunes on harmonica

08:59 - Grant loves to perform entirely acoustic

09:27 - But also likes to play through amps

10:01 - Moved back to Seattle from Alaska and took some lessons with Kim Field

11:18 - Played drums before picking up harmonica

12:36 - First recording

14:04 - Recordings with Jim Page

15:40 - Album with The Improbabilies

16:12 - Music scene around Seattle and move to Louisiana

17:31 - Lafayette is where Grant is based now

18:08 - First solo album: Crossing That River

19:18 - Duo recording with Joe Filisko

20:26 - Anacostia Two Step recording with Phil Wiggins

21:43 - Song writing

22:21 - Grant is also a vocalist

23:07 - Two albums with Johnson, Miller and Dermody trio

24:45 - Playing with Eric Bibb

27:16 - Second solo album: Lay Down My Burden

31:35 - Sun Might Shine album

33:35 - Cajun harmonica

34:59 - Latest album, My Dony, is under consideration for a Grammy

36:52 - How My Dony album was put together

41:33 - Writing modern blues lyrics

42:51 - Recorded on a Hip Hop song

44:18 - Grant does lots of harmonica tuition

45:05 - Areas of harmonica that Grant believes you need to develop

47:07 - 10 minute question

47:39 - Grant’s style of playing

49:42 - Chromatic harmonica

51:16 - Harmonicas of choice

51:55 - Mics of choice

52:17 - Amps

53:26 - Favourite key of diatonic

53:32 - Future plans

55:18 - Different tunings and overblows

55:29 - Embouchre

WEBVTT

00:00:00.353 --> 00:00:03.318
Grant Dermody joins me on episode 24 of the podcast.

00:00:03.959 --> 00:00:10.028
Grant first picked up the harp in Alaska, where he emulated the greats before developing his own acoustic bass sound.

00:00:10.650 --> 00:00:19.804
He played as a session man on various albums before releasing the first of his four solo albums, which included harmonica duets with Phil Wiggins and Joe Felisco.

00:00:20.646 --> 00:00:30.120
In between, Grant toured for six years with Eric Bibb and for his latest album, My Donny, he has returned to his roots with a raucous, electrified harmonica sound.

00:00:30.821 --> 00:00:38.651
Not only a great harmonica player with a strong sense of rhythm, Grant is a vocalist and has penned the lyrics on many of the songs on his albums.

00:00:40.273 --> 00:00:46.960
A word to my sponsor again, thanks to the Lone Wolf Blues Company, makers of effects pedals, microphones and more designed for harmonica.

00:00:47.402 --> 00:00:50.566
Remember, when you want control over your tone, you want Lone Wolf.

00:01:06.561 --> 00:01:09.373
So, hello, Grant Dermody, and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:09.655 --> 00:01:10.177
Hi, Neil.

00:01:10.317 --> 00:01:11.361
Thanks for having me today.

00:01:11.402 --> 00:01:16.844
Now, you've been having some trouble over there with Hurricane Delta down in Louisiana.

00:01:17.250 --> 00:01:19.052
Yeah, that was a big one.

00:01:19.292 --> 00:01:25.179
I left and went up to visit friends farther north, but I'm going to have to head back in the next day or two.

00:01:25.500 --> 00:01:30.885
I think you've had six major hurricanes, I was reading, in the last year in the South of America.

00:01:30.906 --> 00:01:35.731
Yeah, it's a whole different thing than where I grew up in the northwest part of the United States.

00:01:36.272 --> 00:01:37.013
Yeah, never have to

00:01:37.072 --> 00:01:37.953
deal with hurricanes.

00:01:37.995 --> 00:01:40.957
It must be quite frightening to have to experience those.

00:01:41.218 --> 00:01:43.343
I haven't been in town for the big ones.

00:01:43.384 --> 00:01:46.293
I've always left because I didn't want to risk anything.

00:01:46.614 --> 00:01:51.930
Yeah, when the wind picks up and it starts to batter at your house, it can be pretty scary.

00:01:52.418 --> 00:01:59.144
You grew up in Seattle, but before then, I think you lived in Seattle and then you moved to Alaska for a while.

00:01:59.183 --> 00:02:02.227
And that's where you sort of first picked up the harmonica, was it, in Alaska?

00:02:02.587 --> 00:02:04.248
Yes, I grew up in Seattle.

00:02:04.668 --> 00:02:07.331
My dad was an oceanographer at the University of Washington.

00:02:07.570 --> 00:02:11.735
And then when I graduated from high school, I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska.

00:02:11.974 --> 00:02:14.217
And that was where I picked up the harmonica.

00:02:14.456 --> 00:02:15.038
What made you pick

00:02:15.078 --> 00:02:15.117
up

00:02:15.157 --> 00:02:15.737
the harmonica?

00:02:16.018 --> 00:02:18.120
My dad gave me one when I was 18.

00:02:18.319 --> 00:02:22.383
I just was kind of spinning my wheels and wasn't heading down a road in a very good direction.

00:02:22.383 --> 00:02:27.068
direction, and my dad, he thought the harmonica might help, and it turned out he was right.

00:02:27.229 --> 00:02:28.270
It was just the thing I needed.

00:02:28.491 --> 00:02:29.412
I didn't even know he played.

00:02:29.592 --> 00:02:33.074
He was a really accomplished violin player, and I never heard him play growing up.

00:02:33.295 --> 00:02:36.218
And then when World War II hit, he was in the Navy.

00:02:36.258 --> 00:02:40.103
There wasn't room on the ship for a violin, so he grabbed a chromatic harmonica.

00:02:40.242 --> 00:02:41.443
He had a great ear for melody.

00:02:41.484 --> 00:02:43.205
He could just pick tunes out really easily.

00:02:43.225 --> 00:02:46.049
He was a musical guy, but I just never knew that growing up.

00:02:46.389 --> 00:03:09.294
Yeah, so I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska, and it's right during the pipeline, so there's a ton of money around, and there's a bunch of places that have live music there were all kinds of musical genre being explored there bluegrass appalachian old-time fiddle tunes jazz straight up rock and roll blues bands there was all kinds of stuff going on and i just started sitting in with anybody who'd let me play

00:03:09.655 --> 00:03:22.968
so does that explain your different genres that you play because you know like you mentioned a few there you know old time play country blues of course chicago blues but you also play you know bluegrass yourself so quite a range of styles is that what you picked it up in the early days?

00:03:23.429 --> 00:03:24.030
I think so.

00:03:24.069 --> 00:03:25.852
Yeah, it seemed

00:03:25.951 --> 00:03:35.481
like early on, partially by choice and partially by being forced to, I needed to make my instrument adapt to what was going on around me.

00:03:35.822 --> 00:03:42.750
And I learned early on that you can't just play Chicago blues licks in everything that you do and expect it to work.

00:03:43.471 --> 00:03:46.674
You got to adapt to what the genre needs and what the song needs.

00:03:46.794 --> 00:03:48.536
And I've kept that all along the way.

00:03:48.575 --> 00:03:51.579
That's been a lesson that I continue to practice.

00:03:51.780 --> 00:03:58.366
You know, and then from From there, once I got better at the instrument and started to be able to pick up more things, then I started to explore that more deeply.

00:03:58.567 --> 00:04:03.771
I've always admired guitar players, fiddle players, mandolin players that can sit down with anybody and play anything.

00:04:03.912 --> 00:04:05.633
And that's what I wanted to do on the harmonica.

00:04:06.074 --> 00:04:10.139
So did you start off listening to the, you know, the sort of the classic blues guys?

00:04:10.179 --> 00:04:12.360
Is that how you started learning the harmonica initially?

00:04:12.782 --> 00:04:20.810
Well, not very long after my dad got me my first harmonica, which was like a 12-hole key of C, I think it was.

00:04:20.831 --> 00:04:22.052
I still have it somewhere.

00:04:22.192 --> 00:04:24.954
I was literally walking down the street trying to mess with it.

00:04:25.074 --> 00:04:28.379
And this guy walked, you know, we just kind of met at a cross street.

00:04:28.678 --> 00:04:30.120
It turned out that he was a harmonica.

00:04:30.221 --> 00:04:31.422
He knew how to play harmonica.

00:04:31.482 --> 00:04:32.843
He knew how to get single notes.

00:04:32.882 --> 00:04:33.964
He knew how to tongue block.

00:04:34.024 --> 00:04:35.105
He knew how to bend.

00:04:35.466 --> 00:04:37.168
And he started showing me some stuff.

00:04:37.348 --> 00:04:39.511
His name was Jackson Hiley, and he's still a good friend.

00:04:39.670 --> 00:04:41.351
And then another really good friend.

00:04:41.392 --> 00:04:42.514
We're still very close.

00:04:42.574 --> 00:04:43.774
His name's Pat Fitzgerald.

00:04:43.894 --> 00:04:48.500
He was leading the band leader of a lot of the great bands that were happening at Fairbanks at the time.

00:04:48.660 --> 00:04:52.144
And he turned me on to Little Walter Jacobs, and he turned me on to Charlie Musselway.

00:04:52.144 --> 00:04:58.369
So he lent me the Little Walter Master double record set and Charlie Musselwhite's Stand Back.

00:05:14.401 --> 00:05:17.043
And I got lost inside of those records for a long time.

00:05:17.685 --> 00:05:20.767
And then I started looking around at other chess artists.

00:05:21.148 --> 00:05:23.370
So Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters.

00:05:23.730 --> 00:05:25.651
When I heard Walter Horton, that was it.

00:05:26.492 --> 00:05:27.793
He just blew my head right off.

00:05:28.053 --> 00:05:30.136
And Sonny Terry and James Cotton.

00:05:30.216 --> 00:05:33.598
And I was just really interested in what other people were doing with the instrument.

00:05:33.999 --> 00:05:40.725
I was really interested and struck by the harmonica players that could make the harmonica sound big and powerful.

00:05:40.904 --> 00:05:45.108
The first two people that I heard do that live were James Cotton Sonny Terry.

00:05:46.209 --> 00:06:00.983
Oh, and

00:06:02.103 --> 00:06:04.286
then I got really into Slim Harpo, too.

00:06:04.305 --> 00:06:09.350
I still love Slim Harpo, and I recommend that all my students really dive into him.

00:06:09.550 --> 00:06:12.273
So I got into Scratch My Back and Rain It In My Heart.

00:06:13.954 --> 00:06:15.485
Thank you.

00:06:27.170 --> 00:06:28.870
Yeah, Slim Harpo is an interesting one.

00:06:28.932 --> 00:06:30.512
He's mentioned by quite a few people.

00:06:30.533 --> 00:06:34.415
I mean, he's, you know, he's probably not as flamboyant, you know, as great a player.

00:06:34.435 --> 00:06:37.098
He plays reasonably simple stuff, but very effective.

00:06:37.139 --> 00:06:39.781
And what is it, you know, that appeals to his playing to you?

00:06:40.321 --> 00:06:41.081
Oh, he's got great

00:06:41.161 --> 00:06:41.502
tone.

00:06:41.862 --> 00:06:43.684
He's absolutely in the pocket.

00:06:44.245 --> 00:06:46.247
His note choice is really cool.

00:06:46.627 --> 00:06:49.028
His melodic sense, I really admire.

00:06:49.509 --> 00:06:53.512
You know, and he swings like a crazy man and he grooves like a crazy man.

00:06:53.992 --> 00:06:56.555
And he's doing all of that while he's playing guitar at the same time.

00:06:57.136 --> 00:06:58.817
So that's pretty amazing.

00:06:59.639 --> 00:07:00.038
Oh, great.

00:07:00.059 --> 00:07:06.807
So, yeah, so you definitely grew up then in this sort of, you know, all the blues greats, harmonica players on a lot of the tracks you've mentioned.

00:07:06.867 --> 00:07:12.053
So what made you, you know, get interested in the other styles of music that you're playing now?

00:07:12.894 --> 00:07:17.339
Is that something that you picked up on a little later on, or did you start playing it at that young age?

00:07:18.240 --> 00:07:21.545
Well, I spent a long time going pretty hard after that Chicago sound.

00:07:22.125 --> 00:07:22.526
And I...

00:07:22.658 --> 00:07:23.798
I started teaching.

00:07:23.959 --> 00:07:28.023
I started teaching at blues camps, blues workshops.

00:07:28.783 --> 00:07:37.831
And I started hanging out with people like John Cephas and John Jackson and Phil Wiggins and Joe Felisco and Ethel Caffey Austin and John D.

00:07:37.891 --> 00:07:44.476
Holman and Del Ray and Susie Thompson and just, you know, a lot of really great acoustic blues players.

00:07:45.117 --> 00:07:55.031
And so in order to, like I said earlier, you know, when you're playing country blues, you can't just sound like a Chicago a blues player who's not playing through the microphone.

00:07:55.673 --> 00:07:58.161
It requires a whole different kind of playing.

00:07:58.524 --> 00:08:05.084
You've got to be a much better rhythmic player, and the sense of melody is a lot stronger as well.

00:08:05.346 --> 00:08:08.709
And the nuance of the instrument, you know, you have to be careful.

00:08:08.769 --> 00:08:12.372
You can bury a mandolin pretty easily if you're playing too hard.

00:08:12.771 --> 00:08:16.095
So all of that, you know, I started playing with amazing musicians like that.

00:08:16.375 --> 00:08:21.100
And then, you know, I started traveling around and going to different kinds of festivals and hearing different people play.

00:08:21.379 --> 00:08:28.625
And I learned how to play old-time fiddle tunes because I wanted to play with Scotty Meyer and Forrest Gibson from the Improbabilities.

00:08:28.886 --> 00:08:36.894
Forrest and I play blues together too, but that's not really Scotty's thing, but he's one of my top four favorite all-time old-time fiddle players.

00:08:37.254 --> 00:08:43.200
I just think he's a tremendous musician and really fun to play with, and so I decided to learn how to play his music.

00:08:43.640 --> 00:08:46.403
You're probably better known for playing acoustic style music.

00:08:46.864 --> 00:08:56.354
So you went away from the more Chicago sound, you started picking up, say you got interested in playing fiddle tunes, and that got you into playing, being interested more in acoustic sound, didn't

00:08:56.554 --> 00:08:56.595
it?

00:08:56.615 --> 00:08:58.557
Yeah, and I really enjoy that sound.

00:08:59.437 --> 00:09:03.822
One of my absolute favorite things is to do a house concert with no PA system.

00:09:04.102 --> 00:09:21.456
So when I play with Orville johnson and john miller that's our preferred way of doing things and then i'm also in a duo with frank fitusky and we love to do that too so if we're just in a room with just the two of us and we're just making the sounds that our instrument makes with no help from anything electronic that's pretty great

00:09:21.922 --> 00:09:22.722
Yeah, and that's nice.

00:09:22.763 --> 00:09:25.284
People have to be quiet and listen carefully then too, don't they?

00:09:25.304 --> 00:09:26.166
Which is always nice.

00:09:26.426 --> 00:09:27.147
Yeah, they do.

00:09:27.447 --> 00:09:34.873
But then there's also nothing like plugging into a Fender amp and through a static JT-30 microphone and doing that.

00:09:34.972 --> 00:09:38.657
And that's what my most recent record, My Donie, that's what that was all about.

00:09:38.897 --> 00:09:46.884
We thought it was going to be an eclectic record at first and be like most of my recorded work where it's lots of different genre all kind of put together.

00:09:47.283 --> 00:09:51.827
But the electric blues was so strong and so good and we locked in so well with each other.

00:09:51.888 --> 00:09:57.073
that we decided that the record was telling us it needed to be an electric blues record.

00:09:57.533 --> 00:10:01.197
There's some Zydeco and some gospel in there, too, but mostly it's an electric blues record.

00:10:01.217 --> 00:10:05.863
So after your time in Alaska, you then moved back to Seattle, which is where you grew up, yeah?

00:10:05.982 --> 00:10:10.347
We met with Kim Field, who wrote the great book Harmonica's Harps and Heavy Breavers.

00:10:10.548 --> 00:10:10.888
Yeah.

00:10:11.188 --> 00:10:12.549
Oh, man, that was great.

00:10:12.870 --> 00:10:16.293
He's a good friend, and we've known each other a long time.

00:10:16.333 --> 00:10:21.840
I've been playing harmonica five years, something like that, and I'd had a little bit of instruction.

00:10:21.840 --> 00:10:52.754
but I knew that what I was doing wasn't it you know I just didn't have it and you know the stuff that I was hearing other people do on records and live some of it sounded like what I was doing most of it didn't so I started going out and listening to blues bands in Seattle of which there were many at the time and I thought Kim was the best harmonica player in town by a good margin so I hit him up for lessons and we started working together you know he had that whole thing he had that tongue blocking thing at a much higher level than anybody else that I studied with.

00:10:52.975 --> 00:10:54.457
And his tone was fabulous.

00:10:54.477 --> 00:10:57.024
He had this huge, fat, gorgeous sound.

00:10:57.163 --> 00:10:58.969
He could really lean into a slow blues.

00:10:59.009 --> 00:10:59.769
He could swing.

00:10:59.791 --> 00:11:01.894
And he was a scholar of the instrument.

00:11:02.076 --> 00:11:05.724
He turned me on to Dee Ford Bailey and turned me on to a lot of really good players.

00:11:06.004 --> 00:11:07.948
So I learned an enormous amount from him.

00:11:08.354 --> 00:11:13.038
And again, his book is a great read and definitely recommend anybody to read that.

00:11:13.097 --> 00:11:17.442
Like I say, a real scholar of the instrument and has done a great work with that book that he published.

00:11:17.542 --> 00:11:21.205
And before you picked up the harmonica as well, you were a drummer, yeah?

00:11:21.225 --> 00:11:22.326
So that was your first instrument.

00:11:22.605 --> 00:11:25.889
Yeah, I've always been kind of a rhythmic guy.

00:11:26.109 --> 00:11:32.414
I was just banging away on my mom's knitting needles at home in like the third grade or second grade or something like that.

00:11:32.715 --> 00:11:35.076
And she eventually got me a pair of drumsticks.

00:11:35.157 --> 00:11:36.698
And so I started doing that.

00:11:36.739 --> 00:11:41.287
I started studying with a classically trained percussionist from the Seattle Symphony.

00:11:41.628 --> 00:11:47.280
So I did that in school, you know, junior high school, and then I kind of got away from it in high school.

00:11:47.301 --> 00:11:51.070
I started playing basketball, and that was where most of my interest was at that point.

00:11:51.309 --> 00:11:56.261
Dabbled around with a guitar a little bit, but when I turned 18 and my dad gave me the harmonica, that was it.

00:11:56.514 --> 00:11:57.794
I just took off with it.

00:11:57.995 --> 00:11:59.015
It's been that way ever since.

00:11:59.456 --> 00:12:09.946
People often play other instruments before they come to the harmonica and there's quite a few people who play drums and that idea that it's, you know, obviously you get that rhythmic sense which is going to be great to build on and that's definitely a strong part of your playing, isn't it?

00:12:09.985 --> 00:12:13.729
So do you think that has had quite an influence on your approach to the harmonica?

00:12:14.188 --> 00:12:14.830
I think so.

00:12:14.909 --> 00:12:21.735
I think the harmonica is very much a rhythm instrument as well as a lead instrument and I think it's important to be able to do both.

00:12:21.895 --> 00:12:27.006
So yes, I think whatever, yeah, whatever rhythm sense I have has definitely helped on the instrument.

00:12:27.361 --> 00:12:32.186
For getting to your recording career now, you've got a great discography on your website.

00:12:32.245 --> 00:12:33.527
So I'll put a link up for that.

00:12:33.606 --> 00:12:36.090
And again, you play a diverse range of styles.

00:12:36.169 --> 00:12:44.015
So the first album you've got listed is from 1989 with Michael Goethe, which is a beautiful album.

00:12:44.035 --> 00:12:46.859
I listened to it, really high quality instrumental album.

00:12:46.918 --> 00:12:48.639
So what about that album?

00:12:49.061 --> 00:12:50.022
So I was teaching.

00:12:50.042 --> 00:12:53.644
I was teaching in a K through 12 private school.

00:12:54.065 --> 00:13:01.251
And the middle school music teacher heard me play at a faculty party and said, you should be recording.

00:13:01.873 --> 00:13:02.813
I'm recording a record.

00:13:02.854 --> 00:13:03.875
Why don't you come and record?

00:13:03.934 --> 00:13:06.258
So it was my first ever recording experience.

00:13:06.437 --> 00:13:08.220
There was no improvising or anything like that.

00:13:08.279 --> 00:13:10.001
It was a straight melody that was written out.

00:13:10.282 --> 00:13:14.086
And I think the first 16 bars or something like that are all draw notes.

00:13:14.586 --> 00:13:16.447
So you just have to have the wind to do it.

00:13:16.828 --> 00:13:21.313
He didn't really think about what the harmonic can do and can't do.

00:13:21.634 --> 00:13:29.201
He just played the melody on the piano and said that it'd sound good on the harmonica and gave me the music So that's how that worked.

00:13:29.361 --> 00:13:30.984
Yeah, Michael's a very talented guy.

00:13:31.543 --> 00:13:32.105
Yeah, that was cool.

00:13:32.144 --> 00:13:34.607
It was a cool first recording experience.

00:13:34.967 --> 00:13:36.549
You played on the song The Fullness of Time.

00:13:54.447 --> 00:13:56.330
And I played that on the chromatic harmonica.

00:13:56.929 --> 00:13:58.971
So yeah, so that was your first recording.

00:13:59.072 --> 00:14:04.035
And then, so then you recorded with a few different people as a sort of session sort of guy.

00:14:04.056 --> 00:14:06.477
You did a few recordings with a guy called Jim Page.

00:14:07.139 --> 00:14:07.519
Yeah.

00:14:07.859 --> 00:14:09.341
So that came out of doing gigs.

00:14:09.561 --> 00:14:13.624
I started performing with him and then he asked me to be on his records.

00:14:13.865 --> 00:14:15.285
Jim is an amazing guy.

00:14:15.346 --> 00:14:17.567
He's a really good singer-songwriter.

00:14:17.868 --> 00:14:23.692
He writes political songs, protest songs, and he also writes gorgeous love songs.

00:14:24.053 --> 00:14:46.261
And he's a huge Lightning Hopkins fan and Mississippi John Hurt fan and he's a much better guitar player than your average singer songwriter so he's really fun to play with in the studio When I was recording with Michael, and this is not a criticism at all, but it was just, you know, here's the melody, here's when it happens, and this is what I want you to do.

00:14:46.341 --> 00:14:49.585
I want you to play the notes that I wrote, and I want you to play them at the right time.

00:14:49.865 --> 00:14:52.246
With Jim, it was a lot more loose and organic than that.

00:14:52.748 --> 00:14:59.393
It was, well, here's the song, here's how it goes, and we start jamming on it, and if I have a suggestion, I'll go, well, what if we try this?

00:14:59.494 --> 00:15:01.895
And he'll go, yeah, that's great, let's try that.

00:15:02.196 --> 00:15:06.119
Or other times it won't resonate with him, and he'll say, nah, let's try it the other way.

00:15:06.539 --> 00:15:08.643
So there's this kind of give and take thing going on.

00:15:09.024 --> 00:15:09.865
That was really fun.

00:15:10.125 --> 00:15:11.668
I enjoy playing with Jim very much.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
...

00:15:30.466 --> 00:15:39.374
then so i've got you down here's your first appearance on a as a band in your own sort of right was with the improbabilities in in 1998

00:15:39.494 --> 00:16:03.495
improbabilities it's like improbable hillbillies yes so that was the first time i i was part of a band that i was an equal part of and um you know it wasn't just you know like you say being a session guy on somebody else's project that came out of scotty meyer and i playing together in alaska we enlisted forrest gibson to play guitar and then And we got Richie Stearns and June Drucker on banjo and bass.

00:16:03.816 --> 00:16:07.379
And we all went down to New Orleans and recorded at Al Tharp's studio.

00:16:07.679 --> 00:16:10.722
We were there for the better part of a week and we tracked a record.

00:16:10.822 --> 00:16:12.063
And it was a lot of fun.

00:16:12.524 --> 00:16:16.448
This playing and these people you're playing with mainly around the Seattle area at this point, were they?

00:16:16.729 --> 00:16:17.990
Yeah, Jim lives in Seattle.

00:16:18.051 --> 00:16:25.359
Dan Crary, I'm not sure where he lives, but he was coming through to do a recording just outside the Seattle area.

00:16:25.399 --> 00:16:26.980
So I got called in to do that.

00:16:27.360 --> 00:16:31.164
Yes, I was living in Seattle and doing most of my playing around there.

00:16:31.706 --> 00:16:33.969
So what's the music scene like around Seattle?

00:16:33.989 --> 00:16:34.669
Is that pretty good?

00:16:34.710 --> 00:16:38.114
That's up in the northwest of the US, isn't it?

00:16:38.394 --> 00:16:39.735
Well, it's changed quite a lot.

00:16:39.816 --> 00:16:43.740
The club scene isn't anywhere near what it was in the 80s.

00:16:44.042 --> 00:16:47.166
There's just not as many places to play or hear live music.

00:16:47.426 --> 00:16:50.570
So that's one of the reasons I left to go be in Louisiana.

00:16:50.889 --> 00:16:51.071
Yeah.

00:16:51.110 --> 00:16:53.453
So when did you move down to Louisiana?

00:16:53.514 --> 00:16:54.595
Quite recently, was it?

00:16:54.715 --> 00:16:54.916
Yeah,

00:16:54.956 --> 00:16:55.797
pretty recently, about a

00:16:55.836 --> 00:16:55.937
year

00:16:55.976 --> 00:16:56.037
and

00:16:56.057 --> 00:16:56.518
a half ago.

00:16:57.346 --> 00:16:59.198
I'm familiar with the geography down there.

00:16:59.219 --> 00:17:01.876
Is that reasonably close to New Orleans?

00:17:02.702 --> 00:17:03.548
Two hours west.

00:17:04.097 --> 00:17:08.402
Is New Orleans part of the scene there, or is that too far to travel to?

00:17:09.241 --> 00:17:11.884
I don't consider two hours to be a long drive.

00:17:11.944 --> 00:17:14.926
I know people in your part of the world do sometimes.

00:17:16.729 --> 00:17:22.953
But yeah, it's like you have to get a visa and shots and everything to drive two hours in the UK, right?

00:17:23.474 --> 00:17:25.817
Well, you're halfway up the country if you drive two hours here.

00:17:27.919 --> 00:17:28.618
Well, that's true.

00:17:29.079 --> 00:17:30.381
No, it's not a long drive.

00:17:31.161 --> 00:17:34.064
So Lafayette, where I am, has its own museum.

00:17:34.064 --> 00:17:37.949
It's Cajun, Zydeco, and Creole.

00:17:38.229 --> 00:17:41.133
And then there's quite a bit of country swing, quite a bit of country.

00:17:41.232 --> 00:17:44.958
There's some blues, but the blues is more R&B flavored.

00:17:45.317 --> 00:17:49.383
And then in Baton Rouge, you have a more traditional kind of blues scene.

00:17:49.703 --> 00:17:51.506
And then in New Orleans, of course, you have the jazz.

00:17:51.926 --> 00:17:53.008
So it's kind of cool.

00:17:53.228 --> 00:17:58.074
So Baton Rouge is an hour away from Lafayette and New Orleans is two hours away.

00:17:58.194 --> 00:18:04.061
So you don't have to travel very far to get a pretty huge variety of music.

00:18:04.162 --> 00:18:05.022
excellent music.

00:18:06.084 --> 00:18:08.826
Yeah, so back to your recording career then.

00:18:08.866 --> 00:18:13.451
So in 2003, you released your first solo album, Crossing That River.

00:18:13.491 --> 00:18:15.034
What brought that on?

00:18:15.354 --> 00:18:18.678
And I think you had 16 other musicians playing with you on that album.

00:18:18.718 --> 00:18:21.861
So you had quite a mixture of people and, again, styles on there.

00:18:22.461 --> 00:18:25.525
Well, it was kind of what you were just alluding to.

00:18:25.545 --> 00:18:36.089
I felt like it was time to do a record, you know, that I'd been playing music for a while, and it was time to have something that was mine that I put out.

00:18:36.589 --> 00:18:43.519
And what I tried to do is capture the musical relationships that I developed during that time up until that record.

00:18:43.598 --> 00:18:48.845
And so, yes, some of the 16 people that were on the record were people I knew from Seattle.

00:18:49.226 --> 00:18:51.468
Some were from other places that I had traveled to.

00:18:51.508 --> 00:18:55.012
I wanted to capture all of those flavors.

00:18:55.573 --> 00:18:57.634
And I think We were pretty successful in that.

00:18:57.795 --> 00:19:07.580
And then Orville produced it and was wonderful helping me through all of the learning and growing pains that happen when you're doing your very first record.

00:19:08.021 --> 00:19:09.022
It's a great album.

00:19:09.042 --> 00:19:10.846
Congrats on the first album of your own.

00:19:10.885 --> 00:19:11.567
It's really great.

00:19:11.626 --> 00:19:13.670
And of course, you play with two other harmonica players.

00:19:13.690 --> 00:19:17.935
You play with Phil Wiggins on Anacostia Two-Step, which is a great tune.

00:19:18.557 --> 00:19:21.480
And then, of course, you play with Joe Felisco on River of Jordan.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:19:28.066 --> 00:19:39.759
Yeah,

00:19:40.859 --> 00:19:44.785
well, Joe and I met right when the Improbabilities record came out.

00:19:44.825 --> 00:19:49.710
We were both teaching at the Augusta Heritage Center Blues Week in West Virginia.

00:19:50.090 --> 00:19:56.137
And we hit it off right away, and we're both kind of harmonica nerds in the same way.

00:19:56.609 --> 00:20:01.734
We were doing a spa thing and we were kind of putting together a performance for it.

00:20:02.155 --> 00:20:07.540
And he called me up and said, hey, let's do River of Jordan, you know, that Alice Martin, Jay Bird Coleman thing.

00:20:07.901 --> 00:20:09.522
And he knew that I would know that tune.

00:20:10.584 --> 00:20:13.826
And so we got together and we played it and we just locked in.

00:20:14.248 --> 00:20:18.711
So that was first recorded in the 1920s by Jay Bird Coleman and Alice Martin.

00:20:18.751 --> 00:20:24.377
And to my knowledge, nobody else has done it as a harmonica duet until 2003 when Joe and I did it.

00:20:24.769 --> 00:20:25.730
That was really fun.

00:20:26.071 --> 00:20:32.180
And then Anacostia Two-Step was originally called Butt Naked Blues, but Phil toned it down a little bit.

00:20:32.200 --> 00:20:33.561
He decided to call it something else.

00:20:33.982 --> 00:20:35.724
That was also in Elkins, West Virginia.

00:20:35.785 --> 00:20:45.178
We had just finished teaching an entire week with no sleep and basically on our lips going on fumes when we get to the studio on Friday afternoon.

00:20:45.417 --> 00:20:46.619
And we got it in one take.

00:20:46.941 --> 00:20:48.722
We just nailed it, like right off the bat.

00:20:49.022 --> 00:20:50.645
I don't even know if we tried a second take.

00:20:50.705 --> 00:20:52.468
I think we might have just went, nope, that's it.

00:20:58.306 --> 00:21:13.148
Playing

00:21:13.169 --> 00:21:14.151
with Phil is a lot of fun.

00:21:14.391 --> 00:21:16.273
He brings a ton of energy to what he does.

00:21:16.855 --> 00:21:17.836
So yeah, it was great.

00:21:17.856 --> 00:21:21.041
It was fun to do those harmonica duets because not many people do them.

00:21:21.501 --> 00:21:26.130
And Phil and Joe are both good friends and I play quite a bit of music with.

00:21:26.402 --> 00:21:27.784
And, you know, so what do you do?

00:21:27.804 --> 00:21:30.387
Do you bring a guitar player and a bass player in and do something?

00:21:30.407 --> 00:21:32.892
Or what happens if we just play with two harmonicas?

00:21:33.051 --> 00:21:33.792
That was really fun.

00:21:34.134 --> 00:21:34.914
Yeah, great to hear.

00:21:34.954 --> 00:21:36.396
Yeah, so you don't always get that.

00:21:36.517 --> 00:21:39.422
Bacon Fat, of course, had two harmonica players famously.

00:21:39.461 --> 00:21:42.426
But yeah, great to get it, particularly as harmonica fans.

00:21:43.228 --> 00:21:45.471
You're known for your songwriting as well, of course.

00:21:45.490 --> 00:21:47.433
Did you write some of the songs on this first album?

00:21:47.835 --> 00:21:54.986
Yes, I wrote Breakthrough, It's Alright as an instrumental, and then Slow Boat, kind of a folky, slow...

00:21:55.298 --> 00:21:55.759
ballady

00:21:55.838 --> 00:22:06.353
kind of

00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:12.342
tune.

00:22:12.382 --> 00:22:16.867
And that's the one that Jim Page plays guitar on so beautifully.

00:22:17.489 --> 00:22:20.933
Yeah, so those are the three songs I wrote on the record.

00:22:21.218 --> 00:22:26.726
And of course, as well as being a harmonica player, you're the main vocalist, yeah, certainly in your band.

00:22:26.806 --> 00:22:29.549
So that's an important part you're playing as well, of course.

00:22:30.230 --> 00:22:32.473
But that was the first time I'd done any singing on a record.

00:22:32.875 --> 00:22:35.378
Yeah, I'd never sang on a record before that record.

00:22:35.479 --> 00:22:38.743
So that was, yeah, you've got to learn how to do that.

00:22:39.124 --> 00:22:40.005
So that was part of the deal.

00:22:41.007 --> 00:22:44.612
So is that something then that you say you've been a sideman just as a harmonica player?

00:22:44.652 --> 00:22:48.478
Had you not really thought about being the main vocalist until that stage?

00:22:49.089 --> 00:22:54.875
I had sung as a performer, but always as part of an ensemble.

00:22:54.955 --> 00:22:57.819
So I was always sharing the vocals with somebody else.

00:22:58.400 --> 00:23:02.184
I had never carried an entire project vocally by myself.

00:23:02.525 --> 00:23:03.326
So that was a big deal.

00:23:03.486 --> 00:23:06.489
It was a big deal to step into that and kind of go get that.

00:23:07.269 --> 00:23:14.698
Okay, so and then you mentioned that you've done two albums with Johnson, Miller and Dermody, which is another of your outfits.

00:23:15.019 --> 00:23:17.000
First album in 2006.

00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:17.101
Yes.

00:23:18.178 --> 00:23:22.064
So yeah, and then the great second album, we heard the voice of a pork chop.

00:23:22.423 --> 00:23:23.005
I mean, what a name.

00:23:23.025 --> 00:23:24.527
Where did the name from that album come from?

00:23:26.028 --> 00:23:29.954
That's the title cut of the record.

00:23:30.015 --> 00:23:36.345
It's a weird, twisted, obscure blues tune that Orville found, and it's just great.

00:23:36.585 --> 00:23:37.707
I love playing with those guys.

00:23:37.787 --> 00:23:39.608
It's a really fun trio.

00:23:39.910 --> 00:23:42.733
Orville, of course, is a multi-instrumentalist, and so is John.

00:23:43.170 --> 00:23:50.207
But for the purposes of that band, John holds down the guitar parts, which he does so, so, so well.

00:23:50.567 --> 00:23:53.173
And Orville plays mandolin, and I play harmonica.

00:23:53.634 --> 00:23:55.980
And then we all take turns singing.

00:23:56.300 --> 00:23:57.704
So it's just a blast.

00:23:57.765 --> 00:23:58.006
I mean...

00:23:58.337 --> 00:24:04.130
You know, I mean, in some ways it's kind of like Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rochelle, and Hammy Nixon.

00:24:04.451 --> 00:24:06.454
That trio had that same instrumentation.

00:24:06.836 --> 00:24:07.857
Yeah, so that was really cool.

00:24:07.917 --> 00:24:19.000
So it's just, we just get together and we have fun and we throw tunes at each other, performing and recording with those guys and just hanging out is always just one of my favorite things.

00:24:19.713 --> 00:24:23.922
Some of those great old blues songs, as you say, from the 1920s have these great names.

00:24:24.001 --> 00:24:26.807
You can dig them up and they have these names like that.

00:24:27.087 --> 00:24:29.291
Yeah, it's great.

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
.

00:24:45.089 --> 00:24:48.034
In 2008, you started playing with Eric Bibb.

00:24:48.433 --> 00:24:49.736
So how did that come about?

00:24:50.356 --> 00:24:58.105
I was teaching at a blues camp in Telluride, Colorado, which it occurred at the same time as the Telluride Blues Festival.

00:24:58.426 --> 00:25:00.950
So Eric was coming in, playing the festival.

00:25:01.049 --> 00:25:04.974
He came in and did a workshop for the students at the blues camp.

00:25:05.255 --> 00:25:08.739
And at the very end, he asked if I would play with him.

00:25:09.059 --> 00:25:09.921
We just did a shuffle.

00:25:09.961 --> 00:25:11.162
We just did one of his tunes.

00:25:11.462 --> 00:25:13.945
I think it was Don't Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down.

00:25:14.178 --> 00:25:21.167
So after all of this teaching and all of this talking about music, he just, you know, got up and played and asked me to join him and he just loved what I was doing.

00:25:21.468 --> 00:25:25.875
And right there, he said, will you play with me on my main stage set?

00:25:26.115 --> 00:25:26.434
I did.

00:25:27.096 --> 00:25:35.067
So any, lots of people would have had me play in the middle of the set in case I didn't play all that well, they would have had time to recover.

00:25:35.387 --> 00:25:37.951
He had me play the last two songs of the set with him.

00:25:38.732 --> 00:25:40.864
So, uh, He was a gutsy guy.

00:25:41.164 --> 00:25:44.731
And then that started six years of playing and touring with Eric.

00:25:44.832 --> 00:25:47.678
And I think I'm on like six or seven of his records.

00:25:47.817 --> 00:25:49.661
And I've traveled all over the U.S.

00:25:49.801 --> 00:25:52.827
and U.K., Ireland, France, Italy.

00:25:53.228 --> 00:25:56.034
We did a lot of playing together over a six-year period.

00:25:56.258 --> 00:25:57.219
Yeah, he's great, isn't he?

00:25:57.239 --> 00:25:59.941
He's really got that authentic blues sound about him, hasn't he?

00:25:59.961 --> 00:26:01.843
And he doesn't really do solos, does he?

00:26:01.863 --> 00:26:05.465
He's more of a rhythm player, so you get the solos when you're playing with him a lot of the time, don't

00:26:05.605 --> 00:26:05.665
you?

00:26:05.685 --> 00:26:06.406
That's the deal.

00:26:06.586 --> 00:26:10.329
Yeah, I was the only soloist, and we traveled as a duo most of the time.

00:26:10.589 --> 00:26:17.016
And so the trick there is to just make sure that the solos sound fresh and new with each song.

00:26:17.556 --> 00:26:24.281
And the song you mentioned, Don't Let Anybody Bring Your Spirit Down, I used to play that song in a band, because a friend of mine who was in the band used to really like Eric Bibb.

00:26:24.321 --> 00:26:25.884
So that's his song, is it?

00:26:25.943 --> 00:26:26.104
That

00:26:26.223 --> 00:26:28.306
Yes, he wrote that song.

00:26:28.546 --> 00:26:32.430
His mother said to him, you know, that's the song.

00:26:32.470 --> 00:26:35.012
If they only give you one song, that's the song that you play.

00:26:35.532 --> 00:26:38.977
I played that song with him every night that we played for a long time.

00:26:39.356 --> 00:26:40.858
So it's a great tune.

00:26:41.459 --> 00:26:45.323
It always got the audience up and going and clapping their hands and really responding.

00:26:46.183 --> 00:26:46.964
Yeah, so great.

00:26:47.486 --> 00:26:53.852
A song I love where you're playing on the Get On Board album, which is the second one you did with Eric called New Beale Street Blues.

00:26:53.872 --> 00:26:55.713
That's a great one, a real great feel to that song.

00:26:56.034 --> 00:27:15.442
yeah that's a cool tune it's got a nice melody and it's got a nice feel to it

00:27:16.034 --> 00:27:16.434
Yeah.

00:27:16.454 --> 00:27:21.211
And then in 2010, you did your second solo album, Lay Down My Burden.

00:27:21.230 --> 00:27:24.000
I think you had 26 guest musicians on this time.

00:27:24.040 --> 00:27:26.548
So you've definitely got the draw to get the musicians on.

00:27:26.849 --> 00:27:28.932
Yeah, that was a tough one.

00:27:29.192 --> 00:27:35.096
You know, my dad had just passed away and my mom and my wife were both very ill.

00:27:35.837 --> 00:27:37.138
It became a bunch of different things.

00:27:37.219 --> 00:27:38.819
It became an outlet.

00:27:39.201 --> 00:27:43.163
I was the primary caregiver for two years while my wife was battling cancer.

00:27:43.565 --> 00:27:45.987
And she passed away in December of 2009.

00:27:46.326 --> 00:27:53.153
And so she got to hear the album and she got to see the artwork, but she didn't get to see the final pressing of it.

00:27:53.313 --> 00:27:54.114
But she sang on it.

00:27:54.334 --> 00:27:56.816
And that's something that would have really scared her at another time.

00:27:56.816 --> 00:28:01.941
But she figured, well, man, if I can deal with all this cancer stuff, I can sing on a record.

00:28:02.001 --> 00:28:06.727
So we sang Hard Times Come Again No More together with two dear friends, M.H.B.

00:28:06.747 --> 00:28:08.028
Conant and Rich Hill.

00:28:08.508 --> 00:28:14.755
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

00:28:15.316 --> 00:28:22.564
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door.

00:28:23.724 --> 00:28:26.768
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

00:28:26.768 --> 00:28:30.894
So

00:28:30.976 --> 00:28:40.593
during that two-year period, I would just grab some time to play some music with different people, sort of like I did on Crossing That River, but with different kinds of songs.

00:28:41.054 --> 00:28:45.141
And more bluesy, I think, maybe in some ways, than Crossing That River was.

00:28:45.481 --> 00:28:47.965
I ended up playing with three blues musicians.

00:28:48.193 --> 00:28:51.178
musicians that I greatly admire, John D.

00:28:51.218 --> 00:28:54.141
Holman, Louisiana Red, and John Cephas.

00:28:54.321 --> 00:28:58.646
The Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues that we did on that record, that was John Cephas' last recording.

00:29:13.905 --> 00:29:16.650
So there was a lot of loss that was going on right then.

00:29:17.089 --> 00:29:18.998
It was a way for me to deal with it.

00:29:19.179 --> 00:29:22.574
It was a way for me to express what it was all about.

00:29:22.594 --> 00:29:23.980
It was a way to...

00:29:24.609 --> 00:29:29.135
talk to friends about it musically rather than sitting down and having a conversation

00:29:29.796 --> 00:29:47.518
it's really interesting you hear you say that i didn't know that was obviously the history of the album but it really comes across i was listening to the album and it does really have a kind of really mournful feel about it so some of it doesn't it has that i can almost feel uh feel the pain there at the time it you know it does come through i think on that album and

00:29:47.938 --> 00:29:49.319
I didn't want it to be a dirge.

00:29:49.519 --> 00:29:55.288
I didn't want it to be something that was just so heavy that you had to gear yourself up to listen to it.

00:29:55.730 --> 00:30:03.382
And I don't think it came across that way, but I've heard from many people that it has helped them when they were going through similar losses.

00:30:04.804 --> 00:30:08.288
And a song I really like on there is David's Cow.

00:30:08.849 --> 00:30:09.510
What about that one?

00:30:10.913 --> 00:30:16.182
Well, so Dee Ford Bailey did an instrumental called Davidson County Blues.

00:30:16.673 --> 00:30:21.624
He took that from a piano tune called Cow Cow Blues by Jed Davenport.

00:30:22.065 --> 00:30:26.674
I've been playing that song as a solo instrumental for a really long time.

00:30:27.195 --> 00:30:29.881
And Scotty and Forrest from the Improbabilities.

00:30:30.241 --> 00:30:35.373
both really liked that tune and they just kept asking me, you know, play that tune, play that tune some more.

00:30:36.115 --> 00:30:38.519
I think I want to get, I want to see what we can do with that.

00:30:39.141 --> 00:30:43.771
So Scotty added a fiddle part, Forrest added a guitar part and we recorded it.

00:30:44.112 --> 00:30:47.660
And so David's Cow is just a play on where that song came from.

00:31:34.978 --> 00:31:39.407
And then the next album, the first time I heard you play was on this album, the Sun Might Shine album.

00:31:39.768 --> 00:31:40.931
Yeah, I really loved that album.

00:31:40.951 --> 00:31:43.075
And, you know, when I discovered you.

00:31:43.916 --> 00:31:45.780
Again, you had different styles on there.

00:31:46.342 --> 00:31:49.348
And the title track, Sun Might Shine, great.

00:31:49.368 --> 00:31:50.230
I love those lyrics.

00:31:51.153 --> 00:31:52.796
Did you write those lyrics for that song or was it

00:31:52.836 --> 00:31:53.356
somebody else?

00:31:54.049 --> 00:31:56.692
I wrote eight of the songs on that record.

00:31:56.972 --> 00:32:04.121
So I wrote three originals for Crossing That River, three on Lay Down My Burden, and then I wrote eight for that one.

00:32:04.401 --> 00:32:10.508
It ended up, there were some songs about grief, but the grief was from looking at it from farther down the road.

00:32:10.807 --> 00:32:13.131
And that's where the lyrics of that song are.

00:32:13.991 --> 00:32:16.434
She's gone, it's all right, sun's gonna shine tomorrow.

00:32:16.634 --> 00:32:18.797
She's gone, it's all right, sun might shine on me.

00:32:19.157 --> 00:32:21.279
You gotta move on, you gotta keep moving.

00:32:21.460 --> 00:32:22.922
You gotta feel what there is to feel.

00:32:23.201 --> 00:32:25.969
And you can't numb it out, and you can't run away from it.

00:32:26.170 --> 00:32:27.993
But you can't get lost in it either.

00:32:28.034 --> 00:32:29.518
You've got to keep moving and living.

00:32:29.878 --> 00:32:31.182
A lot of the record is about that.

00:32:31.903 --> 00:32:33.909
Oh, yeah, it's all right.

00:32:34.391 --> 00:32:35.994
The sun might shine on me.

00:32:50.498 --> 00:32:52.980
So that record was the first record that Dirk and I worked on.

00:32:53.339 --> 00:32:55.122
And Orville was co-producer as well.

00:32:55.541 --> 00:33:00.646
And Dirk and I had done some recording and some touring with Eric Bibb toward the end of my time with Eric.

00:33:00.886 --> 00:33:03.368
We hit it off musically and personally.

00:33:03.528 --> 00:33:07.353
And I asked him if he'd be willing to work with me on my next record.

00:33:07.413 --> 00:33:08.173
And he said, yeah.

00:33:08.453 --> 00:33:11.736
So I went down to Louisiana and we recorded it in his studio.

00:33:12.057 --> 00:33:13.438
And I was really happy with it.

00:33:13.758 --> 00:33:14.097
It's good.

00:33:14.138 --> 00:33:15.199
I think it's a strong record.

00:33:15.539 --> 00:33:20.463
If you look on the lighter notes, Dirk plays like nine different instruments and sings hard.

00:33:20.463 --> 00:33:24.150
and he engineers and co-produces.

00:33:24.549 --> 00:33:25.932
He had a lot to do with that record.

00:33:26.373 --> 00:33:31.361
I think the thing which really makes an album good is the atmosphere that it captures, and it has that atmosphere.

00:33:31.401 --> 00:33:33.324
I think that album is really, really great.

00:33:33.364 --> 00:33:34.005
I really love that one.

00:33:34.244 --> 00:33:34.726
Thank you.

00:33:35.266 --> 00:33:39.313
One of them is, excuse my pronunciation, J'ai passé.

00:33:39.333 --> 00:33:40.413
J'ai passé.

00:33:40.815 --> 00:33:41.836
Is that a Cajun tune?

00:33:42.217 --> 00:33:43.920
Yes, it's a traditional Cajun tune.

00:33:43.940 --> 00:34:04.396
J'ai passé And it was taught to me by my friend Jerry DeVilliers.

00:34:04.678 --> 00:34:08.873
He's a Cajun harmonica player born and raised in Eunice, Louisiana.

00:34:09.153 --> 00:34:11.215
And he's one of the best harmonica players I know.

00:34:11.235 --> 00:34:14.137
He's easily the best living Cajun harmonica player.

00:34:14.277 --> 00:34:15.800
What he does with the instrument is tremendous.

00:34:16.099 --> 00:34:17.521
So he taught me how to play that tune.

00:34:17.922 --> 00:34:19.702
So I kind of did that to honor him.

00:34:19.822 --> 00:34:26.188
And because the record was recorded in Louisiana, it was kind of a way to add a little Cajun flavor to it.

00:34:26.449 --> 00:34:27.190
Yeah, it's good.

00:34:27.250 --> 00:34:29.771
Again, the different styles on there and hearing that Cajun.

00:34:30.152 --> 00:34:31.072
It's great to hear.

00:34:31.092 --> 00:34:32.153
Very effective on the harmonica.

00:34:32.193 --> 00:34:34.856
The accordion and the harmonica are so closely related.

00:34:35.056 --> 00:34:36.358
You know, I mean, that's the deal.

00:34:36.438 --> 00:34:59.061
It's like in that part of Louisiana, accordion is king it drives the cajun music it drives the creole it drives the zydeco so if you know what you're doing on the harmonica you can make the harmonica sound like an accordion and that was a deal with jerry jerry's mom gave him a harmonica when he was five years old and he taught himself how to make the harmonica sound like an accordion all the hardest stuff there is to do he can do it he's completely self-taught

00:34:59.362 --> 00:35:12.454
and then um your most recent album uh just uh really well put together in 2019 is is my donny album which you touched on earlier on so this i believe is still under consideration for Grammy nomination?

00:35:12.637 --> 00:35:14.327
Is that still something that's going through?

00:35:14.882 --> 00:35:15.362
Yes.

00:35:15.842 --> 00:35:21.146
So the way it works is that somebody who's a voter has to submit you to be considered.

00:35:21.407 --> 00:35:29.034
And then if enough of the voters, enough of the eligible voters vote for you, then you get to the final 15, I think it is.

00:35:29.094 --> 00:35:32.197
It might be 12, but I think it's 15 in a given category.

00:35:32.516 --> 00:35:39.543
And then if that happens, then your record gets listened to by the judges for that category all at once with everybody else's.

00:35:39.923 --> 00:35:43.766
And then if you make the final five, then you're a Grammy nominated record.

00:35:43.987 --> 00:35:46.409
And if you win, of course, then there you go.

00:35:46.449 --> 00:35:50.876
We are waiting to see if we make the final 15 right now.

00:35:51.496 --> 00:35:51.797
Great.

00:35:51.896 --> 00:35:52.617
So good luck with that.

00:35:52.637 --> 00:35:55.422
That's obviously always good to get on those sort of lists, isn't it?

00:35:55.461 --> 00:35:57.724
To help, you know, raise a profile and everything.

00:35:57.764 --> 00:35:58.646
So yeah, good luck with that.

00:35:58.965 --> 00:36:01.509
So it's not something that external people can vote on.

00:36:01.568 --> 00:36:03.070
Is it just decided by a judge?

00:36:03.952 --> 00:36:08.018
Well, there's a committee of, I'm not even sure how many there are.

00:36:08.038 --> 00:36:11.983
I want to say there's like 12,000 voters or something like that that are eligible.

00:36:12.402 --> 00:36:20.382
And in order to vote, you have to apply and people in the music business need to write recommendations for you and that sort of thing.

00:36:20.943 --> 00:36:24.726
There's a bunch of voters from all kinds of musical worlds.

00:36:25.266 --> 00:36:26.188
Yeah, so that's the deal.

00:36:26.248 --> 00:36:30.751
So the public, you know, people who are fans have said that, have said, you know, I love your music.

00:36:30.811 --> 00:36:31.432
I'd love to help.

00:36:31.512 --> 00:36:32.072
Can I vote?

00:36:32.193 --> 00:36:32.753
What can I do?

00:36:33.173 --> 00:36:37.597
And at this stage of the game, there isn't anything really except to hold good intention.

00:36:37.797 --> 00:36:43.382
So we have to get enough of the 12,000 voters to like our record and vote for it.

00:36:43.842 --> 00:36:44.443
Well, good luck with that.

00:36:44.463 --> 00:36:49.936
And then The category is Best Traditional Blues Album, which is in contention for, isn't it?

00:36:50.498 --> 00:36:50.780
Yes.

00:36:51.143 --> 00:36:51.646
Okay.

00:36:52.097 --> 00:36:55.161
Yeah, so that record, the way that came about, it was time to do another record.

00:36:55.240 --> 00:36:57.702
And I said to Dirk, do you want to do another one?

00:36:57.722 --> 00:37:00.085
And he said, yeah, you know, let's do it in my studio.

00:37:00.164 --> 00:37:05.869
So he was doing another recording with Rhiannon Giddens and her rhythm section was in town.

00:37:06.389 --> 00:37:08.873
Jamie Dick on drums and Jason Seifer on bass.

00:37:09.132 --> 00:37:13.556
So we just sat down and we started playing blues and it sounded really good.

00:37:13.657 --> 00:37:14.556
We just locked in.

00:37:14.657 --> 00:37:20.202
We all felt where the pulse was and where the grooves were and how they needed to be.

00:37:20.242 --> 00:37:25.309
And so again, you know, My previous three records were pretty eclectic.

00:37:25.588 --> 00:37:28.373
This one's eclectic, but it's within a certain genre.

00:37:28.472 --> 00:37:32.818
I play more amplified harmonica than I ever have on a recording.

00:37:33.460 --> 00:37:36.023
I mean, it's pretty much a blues record, I think.

00:37:36.224 --> 00:37:37.445
Yeah, there's some gospel.

00:37:37.545 --> 00:37:38.487
Yeah, there's some zydeco.

00:37:38.608 --> 00:37:40.030
But it's mostly a blues record.

00:37:40.309 --> 00:37:41.210
It was really fun to do.

00:37:41.512 --> 00:37:43.173
And it's been very, very well received.

00:37:43.233 --> 00:37:46.179
It's got great airplay all over the world.

00:37:46.259 --> 00:37:48.262
It's gotten really good press.

00:37:48.706 --> 00:37:53.054
We were very pleasantly surprised and gratified by the response.

00:38:11.842 --> 00:38:14.425
Yeah, and I think you recorded it live in the studio.

00:38:14.525 --> 00:38:15.945
We did, except for the vocals.

00:38:15.985 --> 00:38:17.427
Yeah, the vocals we did later.

00:38:17.507 --> 00:38:19.690
But all the instrumental stuff is live.

00:38:20.010 --> 00:38:23.974
That means, of course, that whatever solos you come up with, that's your solo.

00:38:24.014 --> 00:38:24.916
You don't get to fix it.

00:38:25.155 --> 00:38:30.621
So you've got to be in the moment and really just bring everything you have right there at that time.

00:38:31.302 --> 00:38:35.266
And the trick is to play as well as you possibly can.

00:38:35.306 --> 00:38:40.112
Some people play carefully, like They play to not make any mistakes.

00:38:40.434 --> 00:38:41.175
You can't do that.

00:38:41.195 --> 00:38:43.880
You've got to push beyond that and just go for it.

00:38:44.442 --> 00:39:00.614
If you have four people or five people, when Corey came in and played accordion with us and joined us for the Zydeco stuff, when you have five people that are just going for it with no fear and no reservation, some pretty magical, powerful things can happen.

00:39:01.538 --> 00:39:09.666
And you mentioned that, as you say, this is pretty much a full electric album for you on harmonica, which, you know, you normally play acoustic.

00:39:10.027 --> 00:39:14.010
So it's a slight change from your recorded material from that point of view.

00:39:14.431 --> 00:39:18.135
But listening to it, you know, you really push, you know, the electric sound.

00:39:18.175 --> 00:39:21.197
You're going for quite a heavy sort of dirty, distorted sound.

00:39:21.237 --> 00:39:24.541
It's almost as if you've sort of gone, right, I played all these years of acoustic.

00:39:24.581 --> 00:39:29.246
Now I'm really going to push and get us kind of, is that something you deliberately went for on that sound on the harmonica?

00:39:29.346 --> 00:39:31.289
Yeah, because that's what the songs required.

00:39:31.829 --> 00:39:36.418
You know, I mean, I think that, you know, the songs had a certain nastiness and bite to them.

00:39:36.918 --> 00:39:40.483
And so I wanted I wanted a dirty kind of a nasty sound.

00:39:40.985 --> 00:39:43.648
And in some ways, it's kind of circling back to how I started.

00:39:43.708 --> 00:39:50.139
You know, like I like I mentioned, I started my harmonica journey going pretty hard after that Chicago sound.

00:39:50.420 --> 00:39:53.766
I kind of returned to it for a whole record, which was really fun.

00:39:54.114 --> 00:40:00.902
Yeah, so I think that that amplified sound and that bite that it gets was just the right thing for most of those tunes.

00:40:01.282 --> 00:40:08.331
So, you know, when we did that springtime blues, that eight bar tune, I played acoustic for that because that was a better choice.

00:40:08.693 --> 00:40:13.900
And then Great Change, that gospel tune, I played acoustic on that because that's what that song needed.

00:40:14.159 --> 00:40:15.382
But the rest of it's electric.

00:40:15.782 --> 00:40:17.284
And some interesting lyrics again on there.

00:40:17.304 --> 00:40:21.548
And I was going to ask you, is 3559 based on a real experience?

00:40:21.869 --> 00:40:21.949
Yeah.

00:40:22.114 --> 00:40:25.518
Sort of.

00:40:25.557 --> 00:40:27.599
That's all I'm going to say on that one.

00:40:29.621 --> 00:40:44.117
It's

00:40:44.177 --> 00:40:53.922
just, I mean, it's kind of a thing where you get to There comes a time as you get older where you have to start paying attention to age and what's going on.

00:40:53.963 --> 00:41:03.030
You know, when you're 20-something and you're 30-something and 40-something, you know, if you meet somebody who's a few years younger, a few years older, it's not a big deal.

00:41:03.291 --> 00:41:05.273
But as you get older, it becomes a big deal.

00:41:05.833 --> 00:41:06.753
At least it does to me.

00:41:07.094 --> 00:41:11.838
And so it's kind of a humorous way of looking at that particular situation.

00:41:11.858 --> 00:41:15.942
35 and 59 is a fairly significant age spread.

00:41:16.182 --> 00:41:17.423
That's what the song was about.

00:41:17.603 --> 00:41:22.054
Just kind Just talking about what it's like to kind of be aware of that, feel that.

00:41:22.376 --> 00:41:26.746
So it's actually written kind of tongue-in-cheek about a friend of mine in Seattle.

00:41:27.168 --> 00:41:29.273
I told her the song was coming and she cracked up.

00:41:29.333 --> 00:41:30.315
She thought it was hilarious.

00:41:30.556 --> 00:41:32.300
So that's the background on that tune.

00:41:32.641 --> 00:41:35.907
And again, we touched on writing lyrics.

00:41:36.106 --> 00:41:38.030
So, you're a songwriter yourself.

00:41:38.090 --> 00:41:42.617
So, what about this writing kind of modern blues lyrics?

00:41:42.898 --> 00:41:47.003
You do that very well on your albums and it's something which does kind of bring the music up to date, isn't it?

00:41:47.043 --> 00:41:52.152
Instead of just playing all the old classics, which we all love, yeah, but it's nice to get those up-to-date songs, isn't it?

00:41:52.172 --> 00:41:58.181
And is that something you've really tried to develop and almost bringing the blues into the modern day?

00:41:58.742 --> 00:42:07.023
I think in any music that you play, but I think Well, I mean, because I spend most of my time playing blues, I guess it's more in the forefront for me.

00:42:07.364 --> 00:42:08.347
You got to tell the truth.

00:42:08.668 --> 00:42:09.789
You got to get underneath it.

00:42:09.909 --> 00:42:11.632
You got to dig deep and soar high.

00:42:11.672 --> 00:42:13.336
And you have got to tell the truth.

00:42:13.376 --> 00:42:15.882
You have got to sing about something that you know.

00:42:16.226 --> 00:42:18.612
You know, I don't drink, so I don't sing about drinking.

00:42:18.974 --> 00:42:23.666
You know, I wrote some songs about experiencing loss because that's what I was going through.

00:42:23.726 --> 00:42:27.878
And it was a way to get that out and do some healing.

00:42:28.059 --> 00:42:32.050
But it was also a way of communicating with other people that might be going through the same thing.

00:42:32.353 --> 00:42:37.039
The lyrics that I write have to do with kind of what I'm going through and what I'm thinking about.

00:42:37.840 --> 00:42:39.742
So there's spiritual lyrics.

00:42:39.822 --> 00:42:46.030
There's love, not being able to find love, love that didn't work, love that did work.

00:42:46.791 --> 00:42:51.016
And then there's, yeah, so that's what most of my songs seem to be about.

00:42:51.056 --> 00:42:57.583
And then a recent record you recorded on a hip-hop song, All Love With Lucid Dreams.

00:42:57.704 --> 00:42:59.445
So that's an interesting one.

00:43:00.034 --> 00:43:08.384
Myron is, so one of the first people I met when I moved to Louisiana was Elizabeth McNabb.

00:43:08.443 --> 00:43:10.746
And she's just, she's a local gal.

00:43:11.027 --> 00:43:12.889
She's a huge music lover.

00:43:13.230 --> 00:43:16.313
She ran a radio show for quite some time.

00:43:16.773 --> 00:43:21.280
And her boyfriend, Myron, just kind of asked me one day, he said, I'm doing a record.

00:43:21.360 --> 00:43:23.782
It's kind of hip hop and I want to bring some blues into it.

00:43:23.822 --> 00:43:24.583
Do you want to play?

00:43:24.923 --> 00:43:25.764
And I said, sure.

00:43:25.985 --> 00:43:30.512
So he sent me a kind of a work tape And I listened to it.

00:43:30.954 --> 00:43:33.400
He had a home studio kind of all set up.

00:43:33.800 --> 00:43:37.391
Yeah, I went over there and I think we did like three passes.

00:43:37.550 --> 00:43:40.438
And I'm not sure which of the ones he took, but I've heard it.

00:43:40.599 --> 00:43:41.601
And I like what he did with it.

00:43:42.322 --> 00:43:42.724
He's great.

00:43:42.824 --> 00:43:44.248
He's a really, really good person.

00:43:44.608 --> 00:43:46.253
Young guy, full of talent.

00:43:46.530 --> 00:43:50.034
He really respects the roots that he is drawing from.

00:43:50.054 --> 00:43:56.500
He knows very well that the music that he does has a huge blues background, and he pays attention to that.

00:43:56.780 --> 00:44:01.344
Yeah, I always thought that harmonica could work in a hip-hop sense, so it's great to hear you've done that.

00:44:03.987 --> 00:44:13.918
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:18.114 --> 00:44:25.360
So another thing you do lots of, and you've touched on a few times, and you played in lots of teaching camps where you've met lots of the other musicians that you played with.

00:44:25.641 --> 00:44:26.740
Teaching's a big part, isn't it?

00:44:26.842 --> 00:44:29.563
And you're still teaching a lot now, and you're teaching these camps, don't you?

00:44:29.704 --> 00:44:35.208
You teach in the UK, where I live, in the Euroblues Week, where you've met my friend Pete Week.

00:44:35.349 --> 00:44:36.789
So what about teaching?

00:44:36.829 --> 00:44:38.190
What's your involvement in teaching at the moment?

00:44:38.532 --> 00:44:47.418
Well, when I started, I had two main people that were just really willing to pass on what they knew, Jackson and Kim.

00:44:47.659 --> 00:44:49.521
And it's kind of been that way ever since.

00:44:49.641 --> 00:44:56.648
I just, you know, I moved down the harmonica road and I meet people and, you know, maybe they're doing something in a way that I don't do.

00:44:56.869 --> 00:44:58.130
And, you know, we talk about it.

00:44:58.150 --> 00:44:59.192
They show me how to do things.

00:44:59.492 --> 00:45:01.514
I think passing it on is part of the deal.

00:45:01.795 --> 00:45:04.336
It's just something that I think is important to do.

00:45:04.657 --> 00:45:07.159
So I think tone is really important.

00:45:07.360 --> 00:45:10.063
I think you need to learn how to make the harmonica sound good.

00:45:10.483 --> 00:45:13.347
So I work with my students on that a lot.

00:45:13.646 --> 00:45:17.311
I think it's important to be a strong rhythmic player as well as a strong soloist.

00:45:17.371 --> 00:45:18.878
So we work on that a lot.

00:45:19.159 --> 00:45:21.193
I also think it's important to be able to improvise.

00:45:21.516 --> 00:45:23.228
So we work on that.

00:45:23.521 --> 00:45:28.065
I want them more than anything else to develop their own voice on the instrument.

00:45:28.246 --> 00:45:33.931
I don't want them to imitate me or little Walter or big Walter or cotton or anybody like that.

00:45:33.971 --> 00:45:37.793
I want them to have, I want them to learn from the masters, but I want them to have their own voice.

00:45:38.074 --> 00:45:41.177
And so those are the things I think are most important about teaching.

00:45:41.317 --> 00:45:45.581
You know, it's important to learn the great songs that people have done in the past.

00:45:46.041 --> 00:45:56.039
You know, there's great music that precedes us and it's important to be aware of that music and learn from that music, but not to recreate that music note for note on stage.

00:45:56.385 --> 00:45:59.648
Doing a little Walter solo note for note on stage is not okay.

00:45:59.789 --> 00:46:00.969
You've got to do your own thing.

00:46:01.230 --> 00:46:06.173
If there's a melody, like if you're going to do blues with a feeling and do an opening melody thing or something, fine.

00:46:06.275 --> 00:46:07.735
But then do your own solo.

00:46:07.976 --> 00:46:08.717
Do something else.

00:46:09.077 --> 00:46:12.260
And then I guess I'm coming back to something that you asked me earlier.

00:46:12.340 --> 00:46:20.567
But one of the things that was happening with that record, Sun Might Shine On Me, is that here I am six years down the road from my wife's passing.

00:46:20.987 --> 00:46:22.469
And what am I feeling?

00:46:22.528 --> 00:46:23.369
And what's going on?

00:46:23.570 --> 00:46:29.759
And I started looking around for songs that were saying what I wanted to say, and I couldn't find any, so I wrote my own.

00:46:30.019 --> 00:46:31.443
And that's kind of where that comes from.

00:46:31.943 --> 00:46:40.742
So yeah, so I want my students to have a big, open, fat, relaxed tone, and I want them to be able to serve the song.

00:46:41.282 --> 00:46:42.525
I really enjoy teaching.

00:46:42.585 --> 00:46:44.347
I think it's one of my favorite things to do.

00:46:44.469 --> 00:46:53.246
And it's really cool when somebody gets to a place that they haven't been to before and they hear it and you hear it and everybody in the room hears it.

00:46:53.387 --> 00:46:54.449
It's pretty great.

00:46:54.610 --> 00:46:55.893
That'll keep you going for a while.

00:46:56.313 --> 00:46:56.494
Yeah.

00:46:56.514 --> 00:46:59.239
And you're still doing online teaching during this time as well, aren't you?

00:46:59.260 --> 00:47:00.322
So I'll put a link on for that.

00:47:00.514 --> 00:47:01.597
I am, yes.

00:47:01.797 --> 00:47:03.563
I'm accepting new students.

00:47:03.925 --> 00:47:07.195
That's how a lot of us are trying to keep going during the pandemic.

00:47:07.777 --> 00:47:14.458
A question I ask each time, which links very strongly to what you just talked about there, is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend that 10 minutes doing?

00:47:14.722 --> 00:47:19.628
Well, I'd probably pick up a G harmonica because I love that sound.

00:47:19.710 --> 00:47:21.492
It's just got that big, deep, rich sound.

00:47:21.753 --> 00:47:25.557
And I'd probably just start with playing how I'm feeling at the moment.

00:47:25.778 --> 00:47:27.181
Just kind of see what comes.

00:47:27.681 --> 00:47:29.764
It wouldn't necessarily be somebody else's song.

00:47:29.864 --> 00:47:32.449
It wouldn't necessarily be somebody else's groove.

00:47:32.688 --> 00:47:38.277
If I had 10 minutes, I would just sit down and play what's inside of me and just let it come out.

00:47:39.554 --> 00:47:42.556
I mean, you touched on it a little bit yourself, you know, about your style of playing.

00:47:42.577 --> 00:47:49.724
You said a lot of it obviously based on acoustic, you know, the importance of playing rhythmically is something that you really, you know, I think is important.

00:47:50.144 --> 00:47:55.791
Playing bass line, playing chords, you know, fat sound, all these things, you know, really go to make up your style, I think.

00:47:56.650 --> 00:47:57.351
Yeah, that's true.

00:47:58.012 --> 00:48:00.054
All of those things I think are important.

00:48:00.434 --> 00:48:06.822
But, you know, the thing about music is that there's so many different ways to be musical and there's so many different ways to express yourself.

00:48:07.106 --> 00:48:14.577
And there's, you know, I mean, if you're just looking at the harmonica world, you know, you could go down the Chicago blues road and that could take you a long time.

00:48:14.998 --> 00:48:20.648
And then you could go down the country blues, Sonny Terry, pre-war solo stuff, and you could do that.

00:48:20.728 --> 00:48:21.949
And that would take you a long time.

00:48:21.989 --> 00:48:26.878
You could do the overblow jazz thing and that could take you a long time.

00:48:27.139 --> 00:48:29.762
There's so many different paths and there's so many different ways to do it.

00:48:30.184 --> 00:48:31.686
I'm sort of interested in everything.

00:48:31.786 --> 00:48:33.989
So I do a lot of it at the same time.

00:48:34.465 --> 00:48:38.731
But it's important to play what's inside of you and so that it's the truth.

00:48:39.010 --> 00:48:43.416
It's important to play what the song requires in your own voice.

00:48:43.496 --> 00:48:44.476
That's really what it's about.

00:48:44.916 --> 00:48:47.280
And so you never get there.

00:48:47.300 --> 00:48:54.708
That's one of the really great things about music is that the better you get, the more you realize how much we're all works in progress.

00:48:55.228 --> 00:49:00.114
And you just continue to understand that you're a work in progress, the better you get.

00:49:00.353 --> 00:49:03.960
The higher up you move, the more there is to know, the more there is to learn.

00:49:04.179 --> 00:49:05.681
And it never stops.

00:49:06.463 --> 00:49:09.748
I'm always searching for bigger, fatter, more open tone.

00:49:09.929 --> 00:49:14.335
I'm always searching for being able to dig deeper, soar higher, tell the truth.

00:49:14.777 --> 00:49:20.425
I'm always searching for ways to serve the song that I haven't explored before.

00:49:20.769 --> 00:49:25.516
So that's all the stuff that I love to do and never get tired of.

00:49:25.617 --> 00:49:31.005
And I'll be pursuing that until I take my last breath, hopefully with a harmonica in my mouth.

00:49:31.606 --> 00:49:40.920
Well, it's great to hear, you know, someone who's been playing as long as you have and albums under your name, that you still feel, have that attitude to learning and that, like you say, you're open to it all and it never ends, does it?

00:49:40.940 --> 00:49:42.141
So great to hear.

00:49:42.369 --> 00:49:47.005
You mentioned earlier on that you play some chromatic, so you certainly have recorded some chromatic, haven't you?

00:49:47.045 --> 00:49:51.260
For example, you've got It's Alright on the Cross and that River album is played on chromatic.

00:49:52.844 --> 00:49:53.085
It's Alright

00:50:06.882 --> 00:50:08.585
Is chromatic something you play much of?

00:50:09.067 --> 00:50:10.590
Not nearly as much as the diatonic.

00:50:10.791 --> 00:50:13.898
It's something that I've been spending a little bit of time with lately.

00:50:14.219 --> 00:50:16.905
And this winter, I plan on playing quite a bit more.

00:50:17.387 --> 00:50:22.038
I'd like to get to a place where I'm a fluid soloist on the chromatic harmonica.

00:50:22.530 --> 00:50:25.074
And would that be blues or in other genres as well?

00:50:25.414 --> 00:50:28.800
I'd like to get into some jazz, you know, start being able to do that.

00:50:29.181 --> 00:50:35.431
At the spa thing that I was talking about, I've heard incredibly good chromatic jazz harmonica players.

00:50:35.831 --> 00:50:37.554
Charlie Layton is the best I've ever heard.

00:50:38.034 --> 00:50:39.838
Of course, I've heard Toots Thielman a lot, too.

00:50:39.878 --> 00:50:42.322
He used to come to Seattle a lot, and I love what he did.

00:50:42.786 --> 00:50:45.708
There's a guy named Mike Turk that lives around the Boston area.

00:50:45.728 --> 00:50:46.610
He's fabulous.

00:50:47.530 --> 00:50:52.617
And any time I start listing harmonica players, I'm always going, I'm going to leave somebody out that's amazing.

00:50:52.936 --> 00:51:01.146
So that art form is something I admire, and it's not an art form that I do well at all.

00:51:01.706 --> 00:51:03.708
And I'd like to work on that.

00:51:04.269 --> 00:51:05.550
That's just another path, right?

00:51:05.751 --> 00:51:08.153
And for some people, that was their whole path.

00:51:09.014 --> 00:51:10.056
That's wonderful.

00:51:10.516 --> 00:51:11.898
We all benefited from that.

00:51:12.449 --> 00:51:16.436
So we'll talk through gear now and run through which gear you use.

00:51:16.456 --> 00:51:18.902
So first of all, what harmonicas do you like to play?

00:51:19.443 --> 00:51:20.625
I'm a marine band guy.

00:51:20.885 --> 00:51:24.532
I play custom marine bands made by Joe, my buddy Joe Felisco.

00:51:24.913 --> 00:51:28.518
And he kind of gaps them and he adjusts them to how I play.

00:51:28.559 --> 00:51:29.280
I play hard.

00:51:29.440 --> 00:51:30.322
I play very hard.

00:51:30.663 --> 00:51:32.447
I move a lot of air when I play.

00:51:33.228 --> 00:51:34.090
And Joe...

00:51:34.465 --> 00:51:38.210
does, you know, well, anybody who knows harmonica knows Joe Felisco.

00:51:38.291 --> 00:51:43.137
So yeah, he does tremendous work and I'm very grateful to play his harmonicas.

00:51:43.677 --> 00:51:49.123
And then as far as chromatics go, I've got a Toots Thielman hard bopper and a mellow tone.

00:51:49.423 --> 00:51:53.289
And then I've got a Meisterklasse that has long, you know, more notes.

00:51:53.909 --> 00:51:54.710
And that's what I do.

00:51:54.751 --> 00:52:00.157
When I sing and play acoustic, I play through a Beyer M69.

00:52:00.802 --> 00:52:05.949
It's got a really nice range for the harmonica and also my voice, which is lower pitched.

00:52:06.989 --> 00:52:11.215
Yeah, I've got an old Estatic JT-30 that's got a volume pod on it.

00:52:11.596 --> 00:52:16.661
So I can dial it down for comping and I can dial it up for soloing.

00:52:17.443 --> 00:52:22.449
And then I've got an old Champ, like a 1970s Champ that I use for small gigs.

00:52:22.530 --> 00:52:25.333
And I've got an old vintage Bassman.

00:52:25.985 --> 00:52:31.873
that I like a lot, and I've got another Fender Blues Deluxe that I like quite a bit.

00:52:32.355 --> 00:52:33.456
As far as gear, that's it.

00:52:34.137 --> 00:52:36.659
Which amp did you use to record the My Donny album?

00:52:37.681 --> 00:52:38.943
I used one of Dirk's amps.

00:52:39.204 --> 00:52:40.204
He had another Fender.

00:52:40.344 --> 00:52:43.869
All of my amps were in Seattle at the time, so I used one of his.

00:52:43.989 --> 00:52:46.112
I forget what the brand name was.

00:52:46.152 --> 00:52:49.878
It had two 10-inch speakers in it and had a nice, dirty sound.

00:52:50.219 --> 00:52:50.679
But that's it.

00:52:50.719 --> 00:52:51.641
I don't use pedals.

00:52:51.860 --> 00:52:53.543
I don't use octave things.

00:52:53.744 --> 00:52:55.266
I'm probably the least...

00:52:55.617 --> 00:53:10.393
techie gearhead that you that you've talked to harmonica wise i just you know i'm more when i play acoustic i want it to sound just like i play in a room the acoustic sound should be the same thing as the sound with no amplification at all

00:53:10.657 --> 00:53:16.242
Yeah, I was going to make that point exactly, you know, because of your approach to playing largely acoustic, you know, it's exactly that, isn't it?

00:53:16.262 --> 00:53:24.590
And like you say, you like that kind of, you know, real sound in a room kind of sound, which is great, and using hand effects and, you know, all the effects you need, yeah?

00:53:25.371 --> 00:53:25.630
Yeah.

00:53:26.170 --> 00:53:28.574
So what about a favorite key of diatonic?

00:53:28.594 --> 00:53:30.876
I take it that's a G diatonic from what you said earlier.

00:53:31.215 --> 00:53:32.396
I love G harmonicas.

00:53:32.456 --> 00:53:32.916
I really like

00:53:32.976 --> 00:53:33.858
low harmonicas.

00:53:34.298 --> 00:53:39.003
When I was doing the Improbabilities record, I stumbled across low-pitched harmonicas.

00:53:39.163 --> 00:53:43.891
There was a fiddle tune we did called Eupat, And I used a low D on that one.

00:53:44.072 --> 00:53:48.842
Because if I used a regular D, I was going to be right exactly where the fiddle and the banjo were, sonically.

00:53:49.063 --> 00:53:51.168
So I went underneath them and found my own space.

00:53:51.347 --> 00:53:52.911
So I like low-pitched harps a lot.

00:53:53.512 --> 00:53:54.594
Yeah, A's, B flats.

00:53:55.036 --> 00:53:57.501
But it's also true that vocals drive the tune.

00:53:57.697 --> 00:54:01.902
I have to figure out where the best key for me to sing something is and then choose the right harmonica from there.

00:54:02.481 --> 00:54:08.086
Yeah, because I've noticed, because I often like to guess which is the favorite key, and I definitely notice you like the low ones.

00:54:08.126 --> 00:54:11.809
But then I also notice that quite a lot of your songs aren't always played on the low ones.

00:54:12.170 --> 00:54:15.693
You know, you certainly do a few on the C harmonica and a few others.

00:54:15.733 --> 00:54:20.097
So I was thinking, I'm not quite sure what his favorite is, because you do have quite a mix of keys that you use.

00:54:20.637 --> 00:54:22.219
Yeah, and most of that comes down to vocals.

00:54:22.438 --> 00:54:26.143
You know, you've got to deliver the song in the right key when you sing it.

00:54:26.523 --> 00:54:27.664
I used to do it the other way around.

00:54:27.664 --> 00:54:31.248
I used to choose the harmonica I wanted to use and then try to make my voice work with it.

00:54:31.268 --> 00:54:32.829
I don't recommend that.

00:54:34.291 --> 00:54:36.313
That's not the best way to do it.

00:54:36.954 --> 00:54:48.047
But you mentioned low keyed harmonicas and obviously there's great, you know, great rhythmical playing, you know, they got that beautiful sound to them, fat sound, but they can, you know, they sort of sit below the mix a little bit, don't they?

00:54:48.088 --> 00:54:53.914
They may be more suited to rhythmical playing in some cases and they don't quite cut through the same as the higher keys, do they?

00:54:53.954 --> 00:54:56.918
So do you do something to try and address that when you're playing on it?

00:54:57.217 --> 00:54:58.498
I just play really hard.

00:54:58.940 --> 00:55:06.387
I can take it up into an extra, I can kick it up a few notches when I really bring it and I really breathe from as deep a place as I can.

00:55:06.847 --> 00:55:09.010
So I don't, yeah, so that works out that way.

00:55:09.331 --> 00:55:15.458
And then, you know, years playing on jam sessions with a million different musicians all playing the same blues tune at the same time.

00:55:15.637 --> 00:55:17.519
You learn how to make your instrument cut.

00:55:18.099 --> 00:55:20.021
And what about any different tunings?

00:55:20.123 --> 00:55:20.782
Do you use any?

00:55:21.264 --> 00:55:21.403
No.

00:55:22.105 --> 00:55:23.045
And what about overblows?

00:55:23.425 --> 00:55:25.030
No, never did that.

00:55:25.050 --> 00:55:28.903
It was never a sound that appealed to me enough to want to pursue it.

00:55:29.505 --> 00:55:31.713
And what embouchure do you use?

00:55:32.226 --> 00:55:33.626
I tongue block most of the time.

00:55:33.927 --> 00:55:37.391
I pucker the bottom three holes most of the time because I can get...

00:55:37.411 --> 00:55:43.976
I adjust the inside of my mouth a lot to get different shades and sounds of the things that I'm doing.

00:55:44.277 --> 00:55:50.664
And so puckering enables me to do that in a much better way, in a much broader way than tongue blocking does.

00:55:50.864 --> 00:55:54.007
So you use both, but you're mainly a tongue blocker.

00:55:54.367 --> 00:55:54.628
Yeah.

00:55:54.768 --> 00:55:59.291
I mean, you could say that I pucker the bottom three holes and tongue block everything else, but that's not always true.

00:55:59.572 --> 00:56:00.773
Sometimes I tongue block...

00:56:01.057 --> 00:56:02.920
Yeah, sometimes I tumble up the bottom three.

00:56:03.302 --> 00:56:08.891
I play a lot of intentionally sloppy notes, especially if I'm trying to fatten up a melody.

00:56:09.211 --> 00:56:19.630
If the melody calls for a four, five, six, draw, I might widen my mouth out a little bit and make that an intentionally sloppy sound.

00:56:19.873 --> 00:56:20.735
I like those sounds.

00:56:20.775 --> 00:56:23.036
I like those dirty kind of raspy sounds.

00:56:23.376 --> 00:56:34.746
Like, yeah, like for instance, if you're doing something on a C harp and you're playing sitting on top of the world, the way I like to play that melody is to kind of give it some grit and give it some dirt instead of having it be all single notes.

00:56:35.387 --> 00:56:38.250
And so then final question, what about your future plans?

00:56:38.389 --> 00:56:43.635
Obviously you've just got your album, My Donnie's just recently come out and what are you planning to do?

00:56:44.054 --> 00:56:47.378
What we can do at the moment, of course, with the pandemic going on, but any plans?

00:56:47.797 --> 00:56:49.840
Well, I've got three, I have three things going on.

00:56:49.840 --> 00:56:50.240
right now.

00:56:50.280 --> 00:56:51.945
Three balls in the air.

00:56:52.547 --> 00:56:58.581
One, I wrote a song for the woman, MHB Conant, who sang on Hard Times Come Again No More.

00:56:59.143 --> 00:57:00.485
She passed away last July.

00:57:00.505 --> 00:57:01.949
I wrote a song for her.

00:57:02.369 --> 00:57:02.911
A hymn.

00:57:03.251 --> 00:57:05.855
And I'm getting some help from some Irish musicians.

00:57:05.934 --> 00:57:08.657
There's a friend of mine that lives in Spittle, Ireland.

00:57:08.697 --> 00:57:09.699
His name is Charlie Lennon.

00:57:09.980 --> 00:57:11.382
Brilliant Irish fiddle player.

00:57:11.601 --> 00:57:12.402
He's going to play on it.

00:57:12.704 --> 00:57:13.704
Dirk's going to play on it.

00:57:14.025 --> 00:57:20.353
And then Dirk knows a vocalist, an Irish soprano in Cork, who's going to sing on it.

00:57:20.735 --> 00:57:21.876
So it's going to be about peace.

00:57:21.956 --> 00:57:27.983
It's going to be kind of like an Irish version of Dona Nobis Pacem, which means grant us peace or give us peace.

00:57:28.224 --> 00:57:28.905
So that's one thing.

00:57:28.965 --> 00:57:30.206
That's kind of in the works right now.

00:57:30.527 --> 00:57:32.230
We're going to do a follow-through to Maidoni.

00:57:32.481 --> 00:57:41.251
We're going to do another electric record so that when touring opens up again, we'll have two strong records in our back pocket that we can tour off of.

00:57:41.432 --> 00:57:43.195
So we'll start that in the spring.

00:57:43.474 --> 00:57:51.463
And then I just finished tracking an acoustic blues record with my good buddy Frank Fatusky, just duo, just harmonica and guitar.

00:57:52.005 --> 00:57:59.514
And we're dedicating that record to John Jackson, who was a huge mentor to both of us, a Virginia blues guitar player and singer.

00:57:59.842 --> 00:58:03.264
Those are the three projects that are happening right now.

00:58:04.266 --> 00:58:10.893
Continuing to teach, I'm going to be working on putting an instructional DVD out at some point soon.

00:58:12.635 --> 00:58:13.596
That's what's going on right now.

00:58:14.677 --> 00:58:18.240
It's great to hear you're keeping nice and busy and plenty of stuff to look forward to.

00:58:18.601 --> 00:58:20.143
Hopefully, see you touring next year.

00:58:20.342 --> 00:58:21.844
Hopefully, you come over to Europe.

00:58:21.903 --> 00:58:24.045
I'll definitely come and check you out and say hello.

00:58:24.507 --> 00:58:24.987
Absolutely.

00:58:25.047 --> 00:58:26.349
Thank you so much for the interview, Neil.

00:58:26.389 --> 00:58:27.449
It's been great talking to you.

00:58:28.514 --> 00:58:29.876
That's it for today folks.

00:58:30.237 --> 00:58:37.974
Final word from my sponsor, the Longwolf Blues Company, providing some great effects pedals and microphones, all purpose built for the harmonica.

00:58:38.315 --> 00:58:39.840
Be sure to check out their website.

00:58:42.626 --> 00:58:45.833
Grant, tell us all about that tree of life.