Scott Daniel is a Kansas City based harmonica player, vocalist and front man for the Scotty Boy Daniel Blues Band. The SDBB is Shinetop Jr. (Keyboards) Matt Browning(Bass) Joe Mika and John Marx (Guitar) Jerry Riccardi (Drums). Daniel and the fellas just released an album entitled, Mercy that is a tribute to the late harmonica master William Clarke. The record is on Steve McBride’s Blues Edge Records out of Kansas City and it is a good one. After hearing the CD, I picked up the phone and called Scott Daniel and we talked about his background in music. He discussed the Kansas City music scene, past and present. We talked about his love of West Coast blues. We also talked about William Clarke and his legacy. This is part one of that discussion. Part two will appear in the October edition of BLUES JUNCTION. That discussion will also include some thoughts on these subjects by West Coast guitarist John Marx and Jeannette Clarke Lodovici.

David Mac (DM): Do you remember when you first heard the blues and when you first took an interest in it?

Scott Daniel (SD): Yes and yes and it was at the same time. It was through my mother she was into the blues. She was a depression era kid. My grandpa got hooked up in a lot of the work programs FDR had going on. He was a carpenter and he was going around the country picking up work and of course taking the family with him. My mom was hearing blues on the radio. They ended up in Detroit.  She remembered hearing John Lee Hooker on the radio. Blues music was more regionalized in those days and she heard all different kinds of styles from all over the country with all the traveling she did.

I came to the blues through a different window than most guys my age, the old stuff. I started off with the real stuff first. I didn’t start with the British blues-rock interpretation and back into real blues like a lot of guys I knew.

DM: Do you remember when you first started playing the harmonica?

SD: I do. I got my first harp when I was 13. My mother had the Muddy Waters’ album Hard Again. It had James Cotton on harmonica.  That’s the one that really made me want to play the harp. I didn’t really take it seriously until I was in my early 20’s.

DM: Can you recall any other early influences you were picking up on at a relatively young age besides Cotton.

SD: Sonny Boy 2...Cotton lived with Sonny Boy when he was a little kid all the way up through his teenage years. It’s funny, there’s so much power in James’ playing and Sonny Boy’s got a lighter touch but you listen to James, especially stuff he’s doing with his hands, you can hear Sonny Boy in it.

DM: You told me once that you didn’t start playing professionally until you were almost thirty. Let’s talk about that.

SD: That’s right. I played harp for a long time before I got in a band. I didn’t start playing in a band until I was 29 years old. So I had been playing for a long time and just playing for fun and for the enjoyment of it and enjoying blues. I honestly never really had that much of an intention to play in a band, to be quite honest.  It just kind of evolved into that.  Actually it was my mother. She came over to my apartment and I was sitting in my living room playing and she stood outside the door listening to me, I didn’t know she was there. She knocked on the door and asked me point blank, “When are you going to do something with that?” I got to thinking about that and thought, ‘You know why not? It might be cool.’

DM: You mentioned earlier that music used to be very regionalized. How did growing up and living in Kansas City impact your playing or perspective as it relates to this music?

SD: Historically, cats who played blues in Kansas City have a jazzy sound and guys who play jazz have a bluesy sound. I mean listen to Charlie Parker. He has as much blues in his sound as he does jazz, the same with Jay McShann and Count Basie. Then you have guys like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner who are from here as well. Those guys, like so many others, ended up in Los Angeles and brought that Kansas City sound with them. I’m sure that George “Harmonica” Smith, who lived here for a while, picked up on that as well. He had a permanent gig at a place called the Orchid Room here in Kansas City in the 1950s before moving to L.A. I have no doubt in my mind that that’s what helped create the West Coast blues sound that I love so much and that has had such an influence on me.

DM: Let’s talk about some of the local K.C. talent from the 80’s and 90’s who were active when you were cutting your teeth.

SD: There were a bunch of local players you could catch here any night of the week back in those days. We had a great harmonica player here named, Little Hatch. Every harp player here in town learned something from him. He was a great player and he is the father of the Kansas City harmonica, there’s no doubt about it.

DM: Who were some of the other K.C. cats from that period?

SD: There were guys like King Alex, Lawrence Wright, Leon Estelle, George Jackson and others. In the late 80s, early 90s those guys were still going, and some were still going past that fortunately. A lot of the old guys are gone. 

DM: What is going on in K.C. these days?

SD: There are lot of good players and we have some smaller venues where we can play around here.

DM: Are there any organizations that are supportive of this music in K.C.

SD: Not really. We have a blues society of course.

DM Are you a member?

SD: Hell no! I’ve been my own blues society since I was 13. I actually buy my own records and pay the cover charges which pay for the bands. That’s how I support this music.

DM: That’s crazy talk.

SD: Seriously, anytime you’ve got an organization thinking that they’re bigger than the music, you’ve got a real problem. They forget why they got into in this in the first place, if they were ever into it. I think some people like to say that they’re the president of such and such or they’re on the board of such and such, when in reality that’s what they’re in love with and not the music. Most musicians I know resent the hell out of these groups. It seems that they are usually run by middle aged women who want to get into shows for free and get their picture taken with the musicians.

DM: Yeah, I get that but at by the same token there are a few groups out there in the country who I think on the margins do some good, but like yourself and most serious blues musicians I talk to every day, I tend to agree. Most of these cats recognize that the rise of the blues societies and the decline of this music, has taken place over the same timeline. Kansas City on the other hand is home to something very special, The Jazz Museum.

SD: Oh Yeah it is great. I took John Marx there and he was like a kid in a candy store.

DM: K.C. is pretty much in the middle of the country. You had a lot of bands from all over coming through town. I mean K.C. is a relatively short hop, skip and a jump from Chicago, St Louis, Memphis and Texas.

SD: Absolutely and it helped that we had one of the best blues clubs in the world here.

DM: The Grand Emporium.

SD: Exactly! That place was my church. All the great bands that were touring were coming through here and playing at the Grand Emporium including the west coast guys like Rod Piazza, James Harman, Mark Hummel and, of course, William Clarke. By this time I was already heavily into my own playing so it was great to hear these guys live.

I was in the audience at The Grand Emporium the night that Anson (Funderburgh) and Sam (Myers) cut that great live album there. The thing I dug about Sam’s harp playing is that he played trumpet and I think that kind of affected his approach to the harmonica. If you listen to him he has a different sound than anybody. He has his own way of playing and it matched up so well with his singing. Anson is one of the greatest guitar players on the planet at playing behind a harmonica player. It was cool that Sam ended up playing with him because that was a really sympathetic band. It was able to really showcase what Sam did so well. Sam was a great front man and really good offstage, a class guy all the way around.

DM: The demise of the mid-west blues clubs like the Grand Emporium and Blues on Grand in Des Moines really hurts.

SD: The scary part is that young people just don’t have that opportunity to see as much great music as I did when I was an impressionable young man.  I know seeing these great players and being a young man in my early 20s turned my world upside down. It’s just terrible that they’re not touring like they were because young people don’t get exposed to these types of players. I think if they did more of them would get turned on to this music. 

DM: You are right. Sure you can listen to just about anything on your computer these days but there is nothing quite as powerful as hearing a live performance to give a young person a jolt of inspiration.

SD: That is true, but what separates real true blue fans from other music fans is we have to dig to find that treasure. It is out there, but you have to do some digging to find the good stuff.

DM: Absolutely! The bad stuff will find you all day long.

SD:  Dave, we live in a microwave society. It’s a Wal-Mart society. Everybody wants to go in and get what they’re looking for right now, they don’t want to go through any struggle to find what they’re looking for. It’s a discipline to play this music. It also takes discipline to find the kind of music that we love.

DM: Do you think that this has anything to do with the incredible high quality of musicianship coming from the young players in Europe these day?

SD: I think it has everything to do with it. I know this may be a generalization but they seem to have a discipline that their American counter parts lack. It takes a certain discipline to play this kind of music, it’s not just something that you get up and do.  You have to put your time in.  So many of these European players know the history and they know the records. They listen to them.  They do their homework. They know their stuff. It’s beautiful. They seem to embrace anything American. Whereas, we often seem to take our own culture for granted. I know we have good enough musicians in this country, coming up amongst the young people, that they could do it too. Everything over here it seems is blues-rock anymore. 

DM: Why is that?

SD: Simple 1) It is easier to play and 2) It is all they know. I hear these bands, especially some of the young guitar players, and I just want to hand them some Little Walter Records with Louis and Dave Myers on them. I mean that’s some of the most beautiful guitar playing that has ever been put to wax. It’s getting so hard to find guitar players who know how to play this way.   

There’s just so much great stuff that you can still find if you go back and look for it. I hope that some of these younger people will somehow get turned on to that kind of thing.  I’m sure the older players who have been doing this for a long time wonder about it. I wonder about it.  What’s going to happen to this music?  Fortunately, like we were talking about the other day, there’s some younger bands out there popping up in your neck of the woods that are trying to do it the right way that and that bodes well for the future.

DM: What is it about West Coast blues that appeals to you?

SD: Oh man, just the way it makes me feel.  It’s a good time, high energy style of music. There are so many great players out there, who have been making this music for so long. They are just so darn good.  

DM: For example...

SD: Well let’s start with The Hollywood Fats Band. I mean listen to disc 2, the live disc on Road to Rio and Deep in America. Holy sh*t! That is some serious stuff man. They even have Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Roy Brown playing with them. The level of musicianship is just so high. As a harmonica player, I really dig what Al Blake is laying down. I mean we have been doing the Fats band version of the Baby Face Leroy tune, Red Headed Woman in our sets for years now. I read the interview you did with Blake a few months back. He is somebody I would love to talk to some time. You have James Harman and Rod Piazza it goes on and on. Then you have the next generation out there.  You have the Mighty Mojo Prophets, Lil’ A & the Allnighters, Red Lotus Revue and The 44’s, who are coming through K.C. soon. Thankfully through Facebook, I’m getting to know some of these guys.  I just want to let them know they’ve got themselves a brother way out here in the middle of nowhere.    

DM: There is one other west coast guy I want to discuss with you and that is of course the late great William Clarke. You just finished an ambitious CD entitled, Mercy! A Tribute to William Clarke. I want to talk about how that album came about and I would love for you to share your thoughts with our readers about the legacy of William Clarke.

SD: I would enjoy that. I think we should also speak with John Marx who plays guitar on the record as well as Bill’s widow Jeanette.

DM: Let’s do that in the upcoming October edition of BLUES JUNCTION.

SD: I look forward to that. Thanks very much.