There’s something in Harpdog Brown’s blood; a kind of restlessness pulsing through his veins that makes him want to buck expectations and carve out his own path.
Some would call it an adventurous spirit, or even a lust for life, but Harpdog, he has his own opinion.
“It takes a certain kind of character flaw to be able to be balanced in this life of a circus act,” the bluesman said in an interview Nov. 17.
It was early in the morning and he and his touring partner, Art Edmonds, had just finished breakfast. As they barreled down the highway towards their next gig in Regina, Brown explained that just as some people possess a character flaw that allows them to do the same job day in and day out, he’s got one that allows him to spend months on the road, peeling across the country on 12-hour trips from gig to gig.
“I’ve got this other flaw,” he explained. “If you learn how to work with it, and be good at it—then it’s a power instead of a flaw.”
He figures that “flaw” grew in him when he was a kid, living with an adopted family since he was about four months old.
“I never really felt connected to anybody because frankly I never met anybody that had a DNA connection with me,” he explained. That meant he didn’t long for anybody or any place for too long, and it gave him the “gypsy blood” that called him to get out and see the world.
“It’s kind of the perfect storm for me to be pretty balanced in this unbalanced world,” he said.
It’s a curious outlook on the world, but talk to Harpdog long enough and you get a lot of those nuggets.
The 52-year-old harmonica player has been on the scene for more than 35 years, ever since he went to a James Cotton show, and the harp player “just kind of rattled my cage.”
When he and his buddy were teenagers, they decided that they would put a band together. As Harpdog put it, they wanted to travel and play music “instead of being welders.
“We’ll put a band together, and we’ll never have to conform,” he remembered thinking.
His friend passed away when he was still a teen, but Harpdog soldiered on, moving from his hometown of Edmonton to Vancouver, where he is still based today.
Ever since then he’s been a staple on the Canadian blues scene, gathering a collection of awards and nominations from Junos to Maple Blues Awards.
Last year, he cemented himself as a bluesman to the core when he legally changed his name to Harpdog Brown, a moniker given to him by two strangers at a gig back in 1989.
“I don’t know where that came from, I don’t know who those two angels of mercy were, who started feeding me drinks and chanted Harpdog at me, but they made me who I am today.
“It truly was a destiny moment,” he said, and then, after a long pause. “Cool eh?”
Trevor Nichols
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