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DA: Well, I would say when I got started, and I think we talked about this last week, the reason I

picked the harmonica to try first was because it was small and it wasn't that expensive, and I
figured if I had no natural aptitude for it, it wasn't going to cost me or my parents very much for me
to try it [chuckles]. You're going to spend a few hundred dollars to get into a decent guitar. You're
going to spend some money to get a keyboard or a
piano or something like that, so it was kind of a
The Country Blues Duo
very practical thing for me was trying the

harmonica, though I did like the instrument and I
just took to it very quickly, and I loved it
immediately.

The man who got me started on the instrument
was a local guy here in Wichita, Bill Garrison,

who was an old friend of my dad's. Bill was a very
good harmonica player and especially a really
good rack harp player. Bill was a good guitar
player as well, and so he would play the harp on
the rack like Jimmy Reed or John Hammond or
someone like that. He was kind of who got me

started and helped me understand some of the
basic things about the instrument, although he
never really taught me a whole lot actively, he
was the one who got me started. After that the
harmonica players whose music really caught my

attention, the first one was Sonny Boy
Williamson II. He's still one of my favourite harp players. Of course, the Howlin' Wolf stuff I liked a
lot when I was first learning. Wolf's style was pretty rudimentary, but he had a great sense of
rhythm, and I tell a lot of beginning harmonica players that you can get good ideas about just kind
of basic stuff listening to Wolf. Little Walter, of course, but particularly with Little Walter, the stuff
he did as part of the Muddy Waters band in the early days because that stuff, his tone and his
technique, it's still there, but in Muddy's band, Walter worked within a little bit more of a box, a

little bit more of a framework, so it was a little easier to understand. Whereas his own stuff
[laughing] can be a little bit mind-blowing sometimes and so it took me a little while to really start
to understand some of Walter's solo stuff, but yes, his stuff with Muddy really caught me early.

In my early years, I was also really heavily influenced by a guy named Lee McBee, who was a fellow

Kansan. Lived in the Lawrence area and played a lot around the Kansas City area, which is about
three hours away from me but I first heard Lee when I was about 19, at a club here in Wichita and
for some reason, there was something about seeing him play that night that just really really caught
my attention and really lit me up, and I think prior to that I enjoyed playing harmonica, but I think I
viewed myself more as a singer and the harmonica was something that I wanted to be good at, but it
was secondary to me and something about hearing Lee live and meeting him, I don't know what it
was that night, but that was an experience that inspired me to really want to be better as a

harmonica player and really become something more than I was at that point and luckily we ended
up getting to be friends, and he was a huge musical influence and a great kind of encouraging
mentor toward me for a long time. If you're not familiar with Lee, he was the front man of Mike
Morgan and The Crawl. It was a Dallas based band, and he toured and sang on most of those records

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