>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

HARP KING: Paul deLay, of Portland, is ranked among the finest blues harmonica players alive. ().

By Jeff Petersen

Staff Writer

The Paul deLay Band is part of a veritable feast making the table sag at the first Americana Music Festival June 18-19.

The festival will have two stages and provide non-stop music, workshops, contra/square/country dances, contests and jams late into the night with your favorite artists.

That's not all. Food, beverages including a beer garden and Americana arts vendors add to the allure.

Tickets are $30 for a two-day pass, which gets you into all workshops, or $15 for Friday shows and $20 for Saturday shows.

Everything takes place at the Union County Fairgrounds. Camping is available.

DeLay of Portland, ranked among the finest blues harmonica players alive, with his work on the chromatic harp considered by many to be unrivaled, took a minute from his busy life to answer a few questions from The Observer.

OBSERVER: You've appeared in such famous festivals as Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland, the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, the Mount Hood Jazz Festival and Monterey Bay Blues Festival in California. Have you ever helped get a brand new festival off the ground?

PAUL DELAY: Untapped in the Tri Cities. The promoter says they have since moved to a bigger venue and that we as a band had a positive influence on the whole situation.

Band members tend to come and go, but yours seem to hang around for a while.

My guitar player has been with me 13 years or more — Jammin' Peter Dammann. He's one of the most underrated guitar players in the country. Everybody else gets more hype, but nobody's got more chops.

My drummer, Jeff Minnick, and I worked together for a few years before I got locked up. (DeLay began serving a 41-month sentence at the Federal Penitentiary in Sheridan on May 15, 1992, after his drug bust and has been in recovery for more than a decade). He (Minnick) works really well with bass player Dave Kahl. Both are seasoned pros and have a really excellent touch for the blues. There are a lot of old-day subtleties that are lost on today's players

I hooked up with a crazy piano player, David Vest — a boogie woogie child prodigy from way back, probably the late '50s, who grew up ariound Huntsville, Birmingham, Ala. His dad and uncle used to put an upright piano on the back of a pickup truck and drive around to little theaters way out in the sticks. He would do a rock-and-roll piano show before the rock-and-roll movie.

How did you get hooked up with the harmonica in the first place?

The biggest plus initially was nobody was going to make me take lessons on the thing. Almost instantly when I heard a good amplified blues harp, which would have been mid-'60s, I just clicked with it. It just snapped my head around.

Then you got into the blues.

What drew me to it in the first place was the brutal honesty of the lyrics. As the old guys die off, a lot of what made good blues good is getting lost.

A lot of people think blues and depression go hand in hand.

Life hands everybody some rough times, but it's unfortunate that a lot of people think of blues as music that's written in a depressed mood, because it's about all facets of life. Blues music is as different as the individuals who play it. I've been a really big fan for the 35 years I've been playing it, but I'm still discovering old recordings, and new folks too, that surprise me very much.

So some blues can bring a smile or a laugh?

There's humor, there's joy, there's longing — it's not all about loss.

How does the blues fit into an Americana music festival?

It's our thing. It's the American thing.

How has your music changed over the years?

There are songs from the drinking and drugging years that I'd rather not be reminded of. But from clean and sober on, the music I've made stands up to the test of time.

You've put out a lot of great albums. What's the story behind "Paulzilla"?

That was a little dig at the district attorney. A lot of people didn't view me as a huge threat to the community.

Did the drug bust have benefits in retrospect?

I don't want to sound like I'm not taking responsibility for my crime, but I had stopped dealing drugs on my own volition long before I got busted. I was just unable to kick the habit. I was quite relieved to have the government intervene in that respect (to help get clean and sober).

I wrote a heck of a lot of tunes in there and learned to recognized some of the pitfalls involved in songwriting, such as the extremely predictable rhyme that a natural 12-bar blues progression tends to set up.

These days it's much more important to make your point rather than the rhyme.

You're giving a harmonica workshop at 5 p.m. Saturday. How experienced does a person need to be to go?

I do my best work with beginners. I prefer teaching people who have not got too many bad habits ingrained.

What kind of person is going to enjoy harmonica playing?

A lot of people can play really well — little old ladies out there can take their teeth out and go like 60.

Any message to your many fans, or fans to be?

Come down and leave your preconceptions at home becaue we do a pretty heartfelt, uplifting brand of blues, very positive toward women, and good for gray- hairs and babies alike.