Curtis Salgado Interview: Portland's Soul Man on the Harmonica

Curtis Salgado - singer, songwriter and harmonica player

I recently had the chance to sit down with one of my favourite musicians: singer, songwriter and harmonica player Curtis Salgado. What ensued was, I believe, a rich and engaging interview showing Curtis' openness, humility and creative curiosity. The Oregon-based bandleader reflects on his early years, the evolution of his songwriting, and the profound moments that have shaped his musical journey so far.

Read on for my Curtis Salgado interview: a taste of his musical passion, storytelling, and his reflections on authenticity and the people and places that have made him the artist he is today.

The Curtis Salgado Interview

Liam Ward (LW):

Hi Curtis, great to meet you.

Curtis Salgado (CS):

It's a pleasure to meet you. I go down the online rabbit hole and I've ran across you. No one turned me on to you. I really enjoy your work. You're very articulate.

LW:

Thank you very much. I’ve listened to your music for years, I have several of your albums, and I’d love to hear from you about your experience as a harmonica player and musician.

CS:

Where are you located?

LW:

I am in a little town in the southwest of England. I'm about two hours west of London.

CS:

I've only been to London a couple of times. I played with a blues man there who was from Lebanon, and his name was Otis Grand.

"Those guys were walking knee-deep in records"

I saw your lesson on ‘On the Road Again’ by Canned Heat. That is the most amazing harmonica solo. We talked about it before you were even born! It was like, “What's he doing?” and then word came down that he tuned his harmonicas. And that was back in the ‘70s! Time goes on and you learn how to shave the end [of the reed], but I am not good at that. I just buy a harmonica. Al Wilson [harmonica player with Canned Heat] was mild, an individual, an eccentric. And those guys collected records, Wilson and [Canned Heat bandmate] Bob Hite, they were huge record collectors. Those guys went to warehouses. They struck the mother lode. They found a warehouse, down south, just 78s laid on this warehouse floor. They were walking knee-deep in records. Their collection has been used on a handful of LPs that came out of reissued blues records. Al Wilson, literally, at one point, reintroduced Son House to what he was playing on the records. They found Son House in Rochester, New York, and he was a porter for the railroad. At that time there were guys knocking on doors down south, trying to find these old blues guys. They found Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell.

We’ve all played with [John Lee] Hooker here, I’ve done probably eight gigs with him. When I was in the Robert Cray Band, we backed him up and and Robert had to tune his guitar. And he goes, “How do you turn this amp on?”.

You quote Hooker in your lesson saying about Al Wilson, “I can’t lose this guy”. He wasn’t trying to lose him, but Hooker would change when he wanted to change. One of my ex-band members was with him for three years, used to watch his face, he'd do six-and-a-half bars on the IV, no rhymes at all.

“Music is my world”

All the blues guys lived on the west coast. A lot of them moved from Chicago, moved where the weather suits their clothes. So California, Oakland, LA, you know, I worked with Luther Tucker, who's the guitar player on most of Little Walter's records. And Luther lived in San Francisco. All of these blues guys lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Richmond, San Jose.

I got struck by the harmonica and by the blues bug and music bug, just music alone. Music is my world.

The Making of the Man – early passions and influences

LW:

I've got several of your albums. I think you're a great harp player, but obviously a wonderful singer and a really great songwriter as well. So I suppose my question is, what came first for you musically? What was your introduction to music, and how did you start playing music?

CS:

OK, so I know how good I'm not. Watching you, I'm learning from you. What started my music is I grew up in a wonderful family. My father was a baker. He'd go to the bakery and bake bread in the town of Eugene, Oregon. It had the University of Oregon, and it was a lumber town. I lived basically across the street from the railroad, and down the street was a lumber mill and that was the main source of income for the city, I believe, plus the university and a hospital called Sacred Heart. So that's the community - a small university town, and my father and mother were jazz enthusiasts, so I grew up around lots of 78s and LPs. My dad would listen to Count Basie records, Ray Charles records, and he listened to classical music and opera singers. I think my father sort of was hoping he'd be an opera singer. I heard that he was trained and then the war broke out.

"At the dinner table, we talked about music"

My mother was a housewife but also during her young years was a school teacher. And I live in Oregon, there are probably 4 million people in the entire state. Portland is the biggest city, Salem is the capital. They're not big cities. It's not London, you know.

So my folks listened to music and it was the number one thing in the house. It's what we discussed at the dinner table other than the action of the day: 'go dump the garbage', 'mow the lawn', 'rake the leaves', that kind of stuff. But basically the stuff that we talked about was music, and my mother put me on to actors and plays and books. I can't spell that good. I can't do math that well, but I'm an avid reader.

My father and my mother had swing records. My father was a big fan of Pete Johnson and the stride piano players, boogie woogie piano players, Fats Waller. I grew up on that stuff.

Up three hours north of me is Seattle, and Ray Charles spent a lot of time there. He came up there in his early days before he was quote, “Ray Charles”, and that's where he met Quincy Jones and a big jazz scene. Portland is a port town. Seattle is a port town. Tacoma is a port town, so all those jazz guys came through here. It wasn't all east coast. They got out, you know, so Count Basie was in town, and Charlie Parker came through.

Portland is kind of unique in how we take in music. I think literally, the community takes in music and kind of spits it out differently. You know, I'm going to talk about this guy. Might as well mention his name. Now, his name was Paul deLay.

Paul deLay - the harmonica player's harmonica player

LW:

I’m very happy to talk about Paul deLay. I love Paul deLay! I also wanted to ask you: is there a Portland sound or an Oregon sound? Because I see connections between your music and Paul deLay’s music. I think he had a great voice, as you do, and I think like you there's soul and funk and gospel in his music and the instrumentation and the chord progressions. So is that just by chance? Or is there something in the air up there?

CS:

When you're in New Orleans, it's got a sound. You can hear the second line march, it’s a piano town and a horn town. Here in Portland it is kind of open to interpretation.

“He reminded me of a frustrated clarinet player”

Paul deLay was kind of hard to open up and get to know. I saw him when I was 16. He was 19. I’d gone to see Charlie Musselwhite at this place, it used to be my grade school. The band that opened up was called Brown Sugar. And I saw Paul deLay walk out on stage. It was a four piece band: guitar, bass, drums, harmonica, and the singer was the drummer, named Lloyd Jones. Paul was the harmonica player. Paul deLay comes back out. I'll never forget this. He's thin. He's got a long ponytail, and he carries out a big display harmonica like that you hang at a music store. It says Hohner, right? And in the ten holes, that's where he plucked his harmonicas from. It still had the velvet rope on it. So he walks out and he hangs it on the microphone, right? So he hangs this harmonica like this, and then he would take his harmonicas out of the 10 holes that were there, and he just blew me away.

His tone, even then, was like his tone but he would just get better and better.

I came to see Charlie, but I left that building going, “Who the hell is that guy?” He was a hard cat to get to know. But then I gained his respect over the years and we became friends by the end of the ‘70s.

I would play, and he'd go, “Hey bubba, you're drawing too hard. You're putting it out of tune. You're bending.” So, you know, he straightened me out. I had to sit there and compete with the guy, you know. And he’d take a solo, and another, and another. He was kind of like Jason Ricci, who never takes it out of his mouth, he was constantly playing.

“It's hard to find a different angle in the blues”

I remember on a phone call with Paul, I had to say to him - because I admired him a lot - I asked, “Are you into swing music and stuff? Because you remind me of a frustrated clarinet player.” And he laughed. He started talking about his love of Dixieland, and he was into strong melodies. You know, when you hear Paul, he's always singing a song with melody. When you hear people do blues today, there really isn't a strong melody. It's not just singing something over a 12 bar. When somebody sings Stormy Monday, that's a melody. And when Paul picked a song to sing, it would have a strong melody. I grew up singing and I’ve been doing singing lessons my whole time, so even though him and I are apart, we're on the same page. Which is why he didn't hang up with me when I said, “You remind me of a frustrated clarinetist”. He played unlike anybody else.

I didn't get into his singing at first, probably because of ego and whatever, but then I realised this guy's about melodies, man.

He'd learn entire records by Johnny Young, the mandolin player. And Johnny Young is a good lyricist, you know. It's hard to find a different angle in the blues. You've got life, you've got love between a man and a woman, you've got relationships, you got drinking, you've got life on Earth as a human, right? And it's all been covered in the blues.

Harps & Heroes - The Soul of the Blues

LW:

I really love your harmonica playing. Is your harmonica story a tale of growing up listening to the usual guys: Big Walter, Little Walter, the Sonny Boys and so on?

CS:

I'm very honoured because I consider myself a singer. When I was growing up, my brother got a snare drum so I wanted to be a drummer, and then I wanted to be a guitar player. I got mononucleosis and I got really sick. My dad went out and got me a Fender Mustang guitar and a little Fender Princeton. And I took guitar lessons. I had a mean guitar teacher, and I told my mother that this guy's kicking me. If I didn’t get it right, he’d kick me in the shin! And then at the end of the lesson, he'd teach me a song I'd want to learn, something from the radio that was current, like ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix, or ‘The Little Black Egg’ or ‘Gloria’ by Van Morrison or something. So my mother brought home a harmonica book called ‘How to Play Blues Harmonica’ by Tony ‘Little Sun’ Glover. This was the only harmonica book - at least in the United States - for decades. He's got cool pictures of Little Walter in it, and Sonny Terry and all this kind of stuff.

He talked about dominant, subdominant chords, and I got so pissed off because I didn't know what he was talking about. So I just started playing records. And my brother had a Paul Butterfield record, and one that I could pick up and learn easy from was Charlie Musselwhite. I ruined my brother's records by playing them over and over. That's how I learned. I had one of those box portable record players. It was handed down to me from my brother. So I would open it up, put the needle on, and take the needle back and practice and take the needle back.

“It didn't matter what Little Walter played through”

Then my sister brought me home ‘Hate to See You Go’ by Little Walter. You know, Little Walter was a genius. He probably didn’t consider himself one. There's so many guys overblowing and stuff. I love them all, but that's the Charlie Parker of the blues harmonica. And when I would talk to James Cotton, or talk to Walter Horton, when I talked to them, especially James Cotton, he was extremely intelligent, just the nicest guy, you could talk to him about anything.

And he goes, “Curtis, one time I walked into a club and Little Walter’s being held by a woman. She'd got him cradled in her arms and he was blowing harmonica, it was unreal.” And he said this, “I'm serious. It didn't matter what Little Walter played through, he just had it". Cotton goes, “You haven’t even heard half the stuff this guy could do”.

Little Walter - "the Jimi Hendrix of the harmonica"

There's a thing in the [Tony Glover] book where the latest hit was like Coleman Hawkins or something, and Walter would be playing it on stage. He could hear it and play it, and he'd find it. I always had it ruminating in my head that he probably played more positions than one, two and three. And sure enough, he did. I think he played four or five, and he could find it, he'd find it on harmonica.

A lot of people say I don't play harmonica enough, but if it doesn't service the song, then I don't play. I have albums where harmonica ruins the record. At one point if you couldn’t sing like Sam Cook or play like Little Walter, I wasn't interested. But I grew up, I matured, and then I started putting in, maybe from a songwriter perspective, harmonica where it services the song.

I play piano, so I kind of see a piano in my head. So am I as good as you, or this person, or that person? Well it's not about good. It’s like, this is a cool instrument, and I use it when it suits.

I get something from everybody. I steal from everybody. I learn a lick, and then you turn it around and turn it around and turn it around.

LW:

Did you get to meet or play with any of the older blues harp guys?

CS:

I got to open up for Walter Horton. He was in Oregon, at Reed College, then he has the day off. So we found him, and we offered him $500 to play on the night off. He agreed, and I got to open up the show. Here's the thing, Walter was a little tipsy. He came out and played pretty much just three notes, he had little pockets of air in his cheeks like a mini Dizzy Gillespie, I swear. Just this rich tone. This guy’s had to street hustle his whole life, trying to make a living. Not going to do hard labour, not going to be a mechanic. He's got this gift. He can't spell his name, he barely wrote his name on my record. He couldn't read or write, but he could play the hell out of a harmonica. He was unbelievable, and you're in that kind of presence. And then we got to hang out with him for a couple days before they hit the road. Oh my God. And then he sat in with us a few years later. Wow.

I got to play with George Harmonica Smith over the years, probably four or five times. I went down to LA. He came out to Fort Eugene, Oregon and we did a few festivals, and I got to hang. He was the nicest person and had the biggest tone. There's a guy, totally his own thing. He was the octave king.

 

The Craft – Songwriting for Blues Musicians

LW:

I love so many of your songs. And one of the things that strikes me is the wit and humour in the music. Obviously some of your songs are very serious, but there's also humour in your music. What’s your approach to songwriting?

CS:

My approach to songwriting is this: do it by hook or by crook, and whatever works it out.

I lived with Richard Cousins, the bass player for Robert Cray. We are close. I was with Robert for seven years from 1975. Robert Cray moved down from Tacoma, Washington. Robert is what they call an army brat. His father was a career serviceman and actually got to be a high ranking officer. And believe me, can you imagine being black in America, in the army and becoming a high ranking officer? That's extra hard work, I'm sure. Anyway, so Robert comes from Tacoma and Richard Cousins is there, and we're talking about songwriting. So now I have a strong band in Portland, Oregon, and I'm doing rhythm and blues. We do funk blues, we do rhythm and blues, and blues and soul, it's all the same. Those are labels, to sell the product. And I think having the blues label is a kiss of death if you want to sell a product. You know, blues on the radio now is being regulated to maybe a Sunday or a Monday. Blue Monday for a couple of hours on a radio station. It’s not pop music.

Robert Cray

So at one point, I'm no longer in the Robert Cray Band, but we still do shows and we're still friends and stuff, so I'm opening up for Robert and my material is soul music that nobody in this area has ever heard of. You know: Otis Clay, Al ‘TNT’ Braggs, Johnny Taylor. Rare soul stuff and blues and this and that. There's a crowd there and we kick ass.

Well, I'm hanging with my friend Richard, and I kind of jab at him a little bit to say, "you know, we kicked some ass". We were hard to follow, you know. A little competitive edge. And Richard being Richard, goes, “Yeah, you guys did great except for one thing”. I said, “What's that?”. He goes, “All of your songs are cover songs, and all of our songs, except for two, are original”. And he was right, and it does feel different. He said that to me, and he's somebody I love. We're like brothers. So what he said lit a fire under me, so I started writing.

My mother was into songwriters so I knew about Harold Arlen, I knew about the songwriters, and I'm really interested in how things work. I want to know why Alfred Hitchcock is a great director. I want to know why so and so is this. I want to know why Lawrence Olivier is the baddest. I want to know about Shakespeare. I want to know who you are, who's your parents, where do you come from? I'm interested in all that. For me, that's how my brain works. I love history and so, armed with that passion to do that, I didn't read books about songwriting. I just paid attention to it, and I started.

And then you just start reading about how so-and-so wrote this song and that leads me down that hole. The one songwriting book I have is ‘Finishing the Hat’ by Stephen Sondheim. Songwriting interests me. Singers interest me, musicians, that's what rocks my world. And that's all I've ever been.

 

“All the musicians I've worked with are better than me”

Portland's a jazz town so the musicians that I play with, they’re like Thelonious Monk and Chick Corea and the keyboard players. So I asked a lot of questions. All the musicians I've worked with are better than me, but I know my strength and my weaknesses. I know how to put together a song and try and tell a story, but I've done it just by absorbing all the information and working it out. In an interview, Paul McCartney said these words, “There's no rules to songwriting”. If you’ve seen the recent Beatles film by Peter Jackson, people think they're really mad at each other and stuff. But no, that's how it works. That's how it is. And that's what Peter Jackson exposed. This is the most popular band in the world, there’s unheard-of scrutiny by the world on these people. And Paul McCartney, he's got a job to do. They're here. They've got a record contract and people who are relying on them. They’ve got to get a record out on time. They all get together, and Paul just starts to go to work.

Lyrics, it's consonants and vowels and how they feel and sing. That's what's the fun puzzle is. Come and see me play and enjoy myself but I really take the craft seriously. I'm trying to get better, you know? I'm trying to be a songwriter. The odds of me having a hit are nil. I like simple lyrics to tell the story. That's what I'm trying to do. I super admire rap artists, and you know, very much so the rhymes games. Close rhymes, ear rhymes. But I gotta have a melody, I want a song that has a melody and one that's catchy. I can piece it together. I write, I don't know if it's any good. And there's so much music out there now. Who cares, you know? So that's how I write, by hook or by crook.

As an aside, there’s a guy in the UK called James Hunter. Hell of a voice, man. People say he sounds like Sam Cook. I think he sounds like early James Brown. But he's got his own thing, and he's a good songwriter, a damn good one.

LW:

Given your wide range of interests, do you have any strategies for retaining focus? Or do you just let all of it in and see what happens?

CS:

That's a really good question. Well, what I'm interested in, I'm not processing some of it, I don't hold on to. It’s just like, if you and I were to sit down with your family, I'd be asking you questions. I'm an ‘in the moment’ person. But when it comes to a song, I focus in on, “I gotta put a record out, I gotta put on a show”.

“The audience went nuts, and I was hooked”

LW:

Tell me how you got into singing.

CS:

I was the kid that sang on Easter Sunday morning. When I was a little kid, a teacher pinned a note to me and said, “Make sure this gets to your mother.” So I go home, my mother unpins it and goes, “Oh, Miss Cobblestone says that you have a wonderful voice and you're supposed to learn ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and ‘I've Been Working on the Railroad’. I didn't even put two and two together. I just do what I'm told. And my mother sat down at the piano and played, ‘Jesus Loves Me, Yes I Know’. My mother could sit down and play piano, because it was part of the family thing to do. And so I'm learning these songs, and I would sing in front of people. The next thing I know, I'm on stage at an auditorium and I'm out there with another boy, and the boy is taller than I am, and I just did what I was told. That place is full of people. It's the parents of the kids who are putting on this show. This other guy's supposed to sing with me, and he's not singing with me. He's just stuck. He has stage fright. And he's looking out, and I'm looking at him, and I start singing. He didn't sing a word. I sang both songs by myself. The audience went nuts, and I was hooked. Later I did a Glee Club. We did nursing homes, and we did shopping malls, and we did high schools. We were called the Top Notchers.

I introduced the blues to be part of our act. I played harmonica. So we did boogie woogie and blues. I'm reminiscing here, but I've been doing it my whole life.

A Living Melting Pot - The Origins of American Music

LW:

You've spoken about as a teenager, hearing people come to town and the jazz scene in Portland. As an English guy, there's an exoticism to American music, and there's an attraction over here to it because it's come from another place. And the Beatles and the Stones were getting into this stuff because it had a magical element. So what was your experience as an American? Did this amazing music you were hearing and learning to play, did it feel like yours because you were American, or did it feel alien because you're nowhere near New Orleans and nowhere near Chicago?

CS

I never paid attention to [the cultural divide] until I heard the story of the Beatles in an interview. I didn't even know racism, but I learned about it through my father and listening to Count Basie, that's how I discovered racism. But what you’ve got to understand is America is Europe, America is England, America is France. America is Irish and Scottish. Huge elements of the blues in there. America is made up of the world. And it's like, you are Americans. So here comes all the music of the Scottish and British and Caribbean and French, Spanish, and it all comes over here. And then it intermingles with the Native Americans, with First Nation people. And then there is a complete forced migration of Africans.

My father and I would listen to music together, and it wasn't like, “Come on, son, let's go listen to music”. It's just like, have a seat, you know? So I'm having a seat, and I'm sitting there. I'll never forget this. And he's listening, and he's been listening for a while. I just came and joined him, and he looked at me and goes, “Listen to this. Listen.” He's literally talking to himself, because I'm about nine or ten years old. “Listen how Count Basie uses space”.

“You could hear the audience take a collective in-breath”

So one day, I'm listening to a re-release of the 1938 recording of Benny Goodman live at Carnegie Hall. Before that, there’s no jazz at Carnegie Hall. Up to that point, it is classical music and opera, and it just blew everybody's mind. Most of the audience are classical people, and it'll be the first time that they see a big band of jazz musicians improvise and play songs and solo. This recording is one of my very favourites, and I'd like to tell every one of your readers to go find it. And here's what happened to me. I'm listening to this, and it's Count Basie, my hero and the song is called ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, which is by Louis Prima, and then – boom! - somebody plays a solo. In between each solo is Gene Cooper beating on the drums. So I'm listening to this record. And Harry James gets up and plays a solo, and then Benny Goodman plays a solo in it. I think Lionel Hampton plays a solo, and the song's going on, they're stretching it out. And then after Benny Goodman plays like a high C or something, a C above high C on his clarinet, it kind of calms down on the record. And my dad goes, “Listen, this guy is Jess Stacy. He's the piano player, and he's going to change the mood.” And I'm like, “What are you talking about Dad?” And this is where I will learn how important improvising is, and how cool jazz is. So everybody's played a solo, and I am aware enough to know that everybody has and this guy starts his piano solo. Jess Stacy said it was one of the high points of his career. He starts playing a solo, and he starts it out with a little bit of stride, and then he gets touches of classical phrase phrases and this and that, and at one time he just brings the band down to a hush, and they're listening to him play, and he changes the whole concept of the song. And then, Gene Krupa comes in with a double stroke roll, I mean, it's straight out of heavy metal. And then the band comes in. I mean, it's insane. It's mind boggling. And right from that, I was just like, this is it for me.

The Beatles were right. There's all this stuff but it was kept down by racist America unless you were hip and smart and had the right frame of mind and realise that everybody's the same basically, and everybody's basically making different colours and culture. We're all human. But it took the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to make America aware. Now I'm going to throw in my two cents. I had a hip set of parents and a hip brother and sister, and they knew what was happening. So I heard this stuff, and I couldn't wait to see Howlin' Wolf on Shindig. And you know who brought Howlin' Wolf on - it was the Rolling Stones. They demanded it. And I sat in front of the television watching to see Howlin’ Wolf. I was like in the sixth grade or something. They made this effort to turn white teenage America on to the real deal.

 

Authenticity vs. Soul - How Do You "Get" the Blues?

LW:

I think over here [in the UK] there's always a question of authenticity, and almost a feeling of imitation when Brits are playing blues. It’s kind of discussed and not discussed. So I'm always interested to hear from Americans who've grown up there. So it's interesting that your family were into this music that maybe other people around you weren’t hearing.

CS:

I go and play over in Europe, and the French band that I play with, they play wonderfully. And I also play blues with guys in Italy who kill it. They play my material, and they know the nuances. I can't play flamenco. I can't play classical. I would love to be able to play that.

“Peter Green had that X-factor”

So I'm in France, and promoters and the people putting on the music want to have the words USA on the poster. And just as much as in America, if you're from out of town. If I play on the East Coast, you know, "from the West Coast", they use these little things too. So promoters are promoting American music because it makes it authentic, you know. Then you go and you play [in the UK] and you see Peter Green totally blow you off the stage. I mean, he was one of the most soulful blues guitar players who walked the planet. Peter Green had that X-factor.

Is it authentic? Well, there's guys here in Portland that are good guitar players, but have they ever heard of Robert Lockwood Jr or Johnny Guitar Watson? Well, go back and listen to them. You gotta learn the nuances. You gotta learn what's under there.

I'm interested in music, and the music people make, and whether or not they're good loving people, that's it.

LW:

What you're saying reminds me of the almost philosophical fact that every label is, by necessity, arbitrary. Somewhere down the line, a label has been put on something, or a boundary has been put between things: this is A and that's B. But everything is connected, and sometimes labels can be useful, and sometimes boundaries can be useful, but sometimes they can be restrictive and problematic and cause a hell of a lot of problems as well.

CS:

You just said in 30 seconds what I said in a half an hour…

LW:

Haha! That's because I had half an hour to think about it! Curtis, thank you so much again. I really appreciate it, it was lovely to speak to you having heard your music.

CS:

Call me any time. Let's keep in touch.

Massive thanks to Curtis Salgado for giving so generously of his time and expertise. Please visit Curtis' website at https://www.curtissalgado.com/ to find out more about his music.