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THE BiTS INTERVIEW: Dustin Arbuckle

BiTS: Tell me something about your upbringing. Were you raised in a home with a lot of music?

DA: Well, I grew up in the Wichita, Kansas area; honestly. It was not in a terribly musical
household. My dad had been a musician when he was younger. He was a drummer, but I never
actually saw my father touch a drum kit. He loved music and loved blues and classic rock and jazz
and things like that, so I have vague memories of hearing some of that music
when I was young. I talk about it a lot that my first musical memory

was riding in the truck with my dad when I was probably about
three years old, and he was singing the old Leadbelly tune, ‘Gallis
Pole’. Which of course is the much older traditional tune, but I mean
Leadbelly really pretty heavily popularised it in the twentieth century,
and that was the version that Led Zeppelin covered and all that stuff. I
think my parents listened to music and I remember hearing a lot of

country music, old country music in the truck with my grandfather on
my mum's side and things like that, and I loved to sing as far
back as I can remember, but it wasn't as though I had a
bunch of other musicians in the household. I think I
probably was fairly average from the perspective of just
hearing the music around me. It happened that I stumbled

on to the music that made me want to play music when I
was in my teenage years.

BiTS: When did you first start to play an instrument?
Would that be at school?

DA: Yeah, my first instrument was trumpet in the
school band. I guess I would have been about ten or
eleven years old and I didn't stick with that for very
long, honestly. I was in the band for about three years and it never really lit me up. It was never
something that I had an easy time committing myself to. But I did love to sing and after I quit band,

I joined the school choir and that was always something that I liked more, but after I started hearing
blues and becoming conscious of what that music really was when I was about 15, that's when I
started really wanting to play music and maybe start a band. When I was 16, I picked up the
harmonica, and that's been obviously my main instrument ever since.

BiTS: Have you ever played any other instrument? Do you play guitar at all?

DA: I play a little bit of bass. I've tried to play guitar and my fingers are just dumb [chuckling]. I've
never had much luck getting anywhere with the guitar, but I did learn to play bass a little bit back in
the Moreland and Arbuckle days just so we could have that different tool in the toolbox, but it's
always been pretty secondary. From an instrumental standpoint, the harmonica has always been my
main focus.

BiTS: What harmonica players were you listening to in the early days then?

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