Roots of American Music hosted a special performance at the Fatima Family Center recently featuring Austin Walkin Cane, Kristine Jackson, and Dave Morrison. On a stage with some heavy hitters in the Cleveland music scene, Dave and his harmonica stood out. Plucking different harmonicas from his travel case, Dave brought just the right tone and feel to each sone to the delight of the audience.
Dave has played with Cane and Jackson several times over the years as well as with Becky Boyd and Bob Frank. He performed as a duo with Kevin McCarthy. His band Aces and Eights performed several nights weekly for “around twenty years.” Several of these performances were through Roots of American music but he’s been a regular fixture in Ohio for a long time.
Dave has been playing harmonica since 1968. Captivated initially by Howlin’ Wolf and then by John Mayall’s “Turning Point,” he went out and bought a harmonica. From there he dug into Chicago blues and those players. The music, the scene. All of it. “As with anything, you have to put the time in,” he says, speaking about playing harmonica. “And you only put the time in if you really love it. The first 10 years are the toughest.”
Once he hit college, he began to perform very regularly. “College towns were different then,” he says. “You could travel around from campus to campus across four or five states playing parties and small clubs. You could make some money.”
“Overseas people love American music – all of it,” Dave says, speaking about the current state of live music in America. “But here blues is in trouble. Jazz is being wiped out. It’s market-drive. Sales-driven. There are still people who love live music, but the audience is smaller. Younger players don’t have the opportunities I did.”
But for Dave it always comes back to the harmonica and the special magic that’s made on a stage with other players. There’s more to it than just catching onto the chord progressions the other players groove on. His travel case hosts 56 harmonicas of varying pitches and tunings. “There are root notes on different holes. Major, Mixolydian, Dorian minor. It really opens things up,” he explains. “I heard Charlie McCoy getting notes I could never get, and I realized I could file the reed down and get those notes. Some harmonicas are an octave lower. Others are an octave higher. I use about 6 tunings.”
Beyond having an array of colors, it comes back to time and love. “I practice all the time,” he says. “The puzzle doesn’t have a final piece. You’ll never finish it. Every time you think you’ve got it figured out you see a whole new path.”