By Jennifer Fernandes
 
Harpdog Brown is a larger than life, swaggering, smooth-talking 30-year veteran bluesman.
 
“I’m out playing every weekend,” he said between puffs on an omnipresent cigarette at the Lido theatre. “We’re up here in Fort St. John on what I like to call a bit of a field trip because we came up on the long bomb from Edmonton just yesterday.” Fresh from playing three blues festival events last month in Saskatchewan, Canada’s hardest working harp player caught a stroke of luck when playing a hotel in Grande Prairie when he ran into City of Fort St. John Mayor Bruce Lantz.
 
“I had his business card in my pocket because he happened to catch our show in the lounge and when I realized I had an opening I called him up and he made the show at the best venue in town here – the Lido theatre – happen within just three or four weeks,” Brown said.
 
The Juno-nominated Brown has been wailing on his harmonica and crying the blues since the eighties but like a lot of young men breaking into the music business he went down the wayward path of rock ‘n’ roll first.
 
“It took me only six weeks to realize I didn’t want to be a rock star,” Brown chuckled. “I never looked good in spandex, even when I was skinny.”
 
Brown now calls himself the happiest blues guy on earth if only because blues is often wrongly pegged as depressing music. “Hey life would be depressing without the blues,” Brown declared. “That’s how I feel because when you hear the blues it reminds you that the universe kicks everyone in the teeth—the blues is just someone reporting on life as how they see it.” “You know it’s like a fridge magnet I saw once that said, ‘It’s always a sunny day, it’s just sometimes there’s clouds in the way.”’
 
Influenced by greats like Muddy Waters – who Brown has named his son McKinley after – Fats Walker and Louis Armstrong, Brown calls his style of blues more of traditional blues mixed with a jazz edge that he and piano player Graham Guest deliver with an old school feel.
 
Brown and Guest cut their first album a year ago called ‘Above & Beyond’ and the record was so-named because it attempted to elevate traditional blues above and beyond the usual.
 
The duo is excited to start work on their second CD next week, once again in Edmonton’s Homestead Studios, and plan to call it “Naturally’ because of the truly acoustic sound that will come from Guest on grand piano and Brown on vocals and the harmonica.
 
“When I was 17 I saw James Cotton play and he ruined my life,” Brown smiled. “He ruined my life because he made me want to play harmonica for the rest of my life.”
 
“We do original music and covers of all the greats, but to me it’s the message of the song—it’s got to be the truth.”