Cover photo © 2025 Bob Kieser

In 2017, Moreland & Arbuckle was a rising blues band on Alligator Records. They were just nominated Blues Music Awards and Blues Blast Awards. They were praised for their gritty juke joint sound. The band played hundreds of shows around the world over 15 years and opened for some of the biggest names in blues like Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, ZZ Top, George Thorogood, and the like. Then they called it quits. Dustin Arbuckle wanted to keep playing and stay in the game, so he did. It hasn’t been easy.

Wichita, Kansas is 90 miles east of the geographic center of the United States. It’s from this small city, where Arbuckle lives and operates his many musical pursuits. It’s proven to be a good central hub.

“We can basically be anywhere in the lower 48 and parts of southern Canada within a fairly easy day’s drive or a hard day’s drive. This is a part of the country where cost of living is pretty low. When you’re making a living as a full-time musician that definitely helps. More work is available in some other markets, so that compensates for it,” Arbuckle said.

Having played gigs since his late teens, Arbuckle has been there and done that and knows the reality of a working musician’s life and the current landscape.

“It’s become more difficult. In my touring career, which is basically 20 years, I’ve seen it decline from a club show standpoint. We have our network of regional clubs that we play a couple, three times a year. It’s gotten much more difficult to string together longer runs. It’s really hard to do more than long weekend regional runs, unless you have two or more festivals or special events that you can anchor a tour around. You need special events to bankroll a tour. The vast majority of our touring schedule is now two to four-day regional run stuff around the Midwest. We do some European stuff as well, every couple of years we have a chance to go over there. I’d like to build the band’s footprint over there. We do great in Poland. It helps that there are people in that part of Europe, a specific agency Delta Touring based in Poland, that has a really good group of venues and festivals they work with in Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Austria, which has made that a solid part of Europe. M & A (Moreland & Arbuckle) did really well in Spain, Italy, in the U.K., Switzerland, Austria, a little bit in the low countries. There are great audiences for blues-based music in those territories as well. It’s just a question of getting there because overhead is a thing and you need to make enough money to make it work.”

The harp ace is busy these days juggling multiple acts in multiple genres, including Dustin Arbuckle & The Damnations and bluegrassy outfit Haymakers.

“I split my time pretty evenly between The Damnations and Haymakers. Our bass player, Caleb Drummond, is also in both bands. The Damnations is a blues, roots-rock kind of a thing. Haymakers is an acoustic string band. Myself on lead vocals and harp, Tom Page on acoustic guitar, Caleb on upright bass, and Evan Ogborn on mandolin, so it’s more oriented toward folk, bluegrass, old school country and western swing, and blues is a component in that band. In The Damnations, a guy named Brandon Hudspeth is our guitar player. He’s also with a duo called Hudspeth & Taylor, they’ve been award-nominated. He’s had a Kansas City-based band called Levee Town. I frankly think he’s the most underrated guitar player on the blues scene. Our drummer is Colby Aiken, he’s been with us since about 2021. The Damnations started in 2017 and it’s been a thing ever since. Haymakers began around 2011-12 as a side project during the M & A years, but Tom and I had always wanted to build it up being a touring act, so it’s been great to have that opportunity the last seven or eight years. Each band kind of tours as they can. I also do a harp-guitar duo with a great guitar player from Iowa, Matt Woods. We were proud of that record. It got nominated for a BMA and a Blues Blast award. I also have a duo here in Wichita with Wayne Long, who’s a good Mississippi John Hurt-style finger picker, and we put a record out that got nominated for a Blues Blast award. That’s another necessity of the modern touring world. You have to have different things going. In both of my bands, everyone had multiple touring acts that they work with. It can get complicated. That’s another balancing act that we’re trying to perform.”

All of those acts have had some modicum of success in recent years and the records are all of high quality. The Damnations in particular had some good exposure in 2025.

“We had a couple of really solid festival dates with The Damnations in the late summer months. We had a great set at the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. We had a great audience and sold a lot of merch. That’s very encouraging. We did the Waukesha Rotary Blues Fest up in Wisconsin, that was another good one. Every time you’re able to get in front of those bigger audiences and get a good response and get in a position to do that more often it helps you know that the band has the appeal to level-up in that way.”

It sounds like The Damnations are the act that is closest to putting out a new record, with Haymakers to follow in the back half of 2026.

“The Damnations are in the process of getting a new album recorded now. All the bed tracks are down, we’ll recut lead parts and get the vocals done. We’re planning on having something out in the first half of 2026. Haymakers is also in the process. I would like to find a good label to work with again. A lot of people will try to tell you a label doesn’t matter anymore, but good labels have resources. If you can work with a label with whom you can form a good partnership and they have the resources to promote and get your music out to outlets and publications, that might be harder for you to do when you’re self-releasing or cost you more money if you have to hire publicity. I think that can be helpful. Some booking agencies may be a little more interested in you if you’re in a solid label situation because they know you have that publicity assistance and things like that. Not to say that you can’t do it independently. It’s a lot to balance. It’s a lot of hats for whoever in the band is doing the administrative and business work. You try to delegate those responsibilities. Different people have different strengths. Being with the right label can help alleviate some of that, but if the right situation isn’t there, I’m happy to self-release.”

Arbuckle has been playing the harp for almost 30 years and is ultra-conversant in the classic and modern practitioners of the instrument.

“I got started on the harmonica when I was 16. I had a different route into it than a lot of modern blues fans have, I didn’t come into it through the classic rock angle. I got into blues because my Dad was into blues and frankly because we had a tumultuous relationship it was something that I think I hoped would be a good connection for us and it was. When I started listening to blues, it was the more traditional stuff that lit me up and still does. Pretty soon I started listening to a lot of early Chicago blues stuff and traditional country blues.”

“The guy who got me started was an old friend of my Dad’s who played around the Wichita area named Bill Garrison. There was another good, local harmonica player named David Graham who really helped me out a lot in the early days. As far as the iconic classic guys, the first guy who really lit me up and whose playing I first remember trying to emulate was Sonny Boy Williamson II, Rice Miller. I think he has a very vocal quality to his harmonica playing and maybe that appealed to me. Sonny Terry was another early one.”

“As far as amplified harp players, Little Walter was huge. The stuff that caught me first with Little Walter was the stuff he did with Muddy Waters. I love Muddy, a tremendous influence on me musically and he always had good harp players. He also reigned Walter in a little bit. If you hear some of Walter’s own stuff, it might have been over my head. You hear a song like “Roller Coaster” and if you’re not there yet, that’s pretty mind blowing, some of the stuff he did. George “Harmonica” Smith, Big Walter Horton, (Paul) Butterfield’s stuff I enjoyed a lot, Kim Wilson, Charlie Musselwhite.”

“Even guys who have been big contemporaries of mine, I love Brandon Santini, Brandon’s a great harmonica player. Steve Mariner, I love his stuff. I’m really encouraged by that kid Harrell Davenport, man. He’s a good player and it’s cool to see a younger guy picking up stuff in that style.”

“As far as one more guy who was a big direct influence on me, was a cat named Lee McBee, we lost him about eleven years ago. Lee was a great, great singer and harmonica player, a fellow Kansan. He played a lot around Kansas City, but also toured with Mike Morgan and The Crawl, a Dallas-based act. Lee was the front man of that band from the tail end of the 80’s off and on through the early 2000’s, so he toured North American and Europe with Mike. Maybe not as technical as Kim Wilson, but a great singer and Lee had his own thing.”

“I saw him the first time when I was 19 at a club here in Wichita called The Roadhouse and it was a life-changing show for me. Random club show, but prior to seeing Lee live, I was a singer who also played harmonica. There was something about seeing Lee that was really inspiring for me. It was one of the first times I had seen a truly great harmonica player in-person. He also was really nice to me. He was gracious with his time talking to this young dorky kid who was super-engaged with what he was doing”

“I bought a copy of his CD called 44 Blues (Lee McBee and The Passions) and it’s an outstanding old-school blues record and that thing didn’t leave the CD player in my car for a couple weeks. I immediately started trying to figure out what he was doing. Over the course of the next couple years, we got to be friends. He had a residency every Sunday night at B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ in Kansas City and every few weeks for a while I would drive up to Kansas City, a three-hour drive, to see Lee McBee and the Confessors, which was a killer band and tried to soak it. He was that living, breathing (chokes up) musical hero for me. Little Walter was dead. Lee was a guy I could talk to on the phone or see live. He was a big musical mentor to me and his style was influential on me. I loved Lee.”

This journey that started in a Wichita bar and has taken Arbuckle around the world has been both joyous and grueling. He’s a successful touring musician who is slugging it out and wearing many hats. “Roller Coaster” could be the theme song for this ride.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s been an interesting journey. The Moreland & Arbuckle thing lasted a long time and I’m still very proud of the music we made in that band and the experiences we got to have. Right around the time that was splitting up and I was transitioning into my new life touring with multiple acts and exploring and expanding what I was doing musically…at the same time I was also becoming a father for the first time. I was in the first few years of my marriage. I’m really lucky, my wife Michelle is tremendously supportive and has always understood why I need to do this and gets it. I could not do this without her support and love.”

“It was a time of a lot of transitions for me in my life and also coming into middle age and the pandemic. It’s been a really crazy journey the last decade or so. More juggling and more things to manage in my life that I never had to before and figure out how to balance those things. I’ve had a lot of pretty heavy mental health issues come up over the last few years and things that I’m really trying hard to cope with right now. The reason I am talking about this is that I know from talking to my contemporaries and friends on the scene that these are things that a lot of us deal with and the place that the live music world is in right now and the music business is in just exacerbates all of that.”

“This is kind of a dark joke, but it’s real and this is a big thing for me. The music industry kind of runs on mental illness. Very few of us are doing this because we’re OK. I think most of us are doing this because (pause) we need help. We need it to help or cope with something on a mental and emotional level. Music can help you do that, whether you’re an artist or fan, it’s kind of what music is for. It’s a very emotional thing. It can become a big part of who you are and help you through those things.”

“There’s a lot of us out there that are really struggling these days. It’s gotten harder and harder to make a living off of it. It just exacerbates the mental health struggles and for a lot of people that leads to substance abuse issues. I see so many of my friends and other people out there dealing with a lot of this stuff. It’s important for us to not be afraid to talk to each other and to get help, in whatever way you can. Don’t be afraid to compare notes and empathize with each other about the ways we’re all struggling and the life in general and to lean on each other. We don’t need to lose more people out here, man. There’s a lot of really not OK things going on (in the world) and it’s just hard on all of us. Just come together and try to help each other. Hopefully through that we can build community and not feel like we have to be competitive with each other.”

Arbuckle is concerned for the genre of the blues, but also sees glimmers of hope and has opinions about the way to increase its popularity.

“The traditional audience for this music is shrinking, the blues audience. We haven’t seen the influx in young people in the last 20 to 30 years that happened in the 20 to 30 years prior to that. I’m encouraged by the younger artists and their inclination toward more traditional blues. We’ve tried so long to value blues because of its influence on other things. That’s fine if it helps people connect to the music, but I want people to value the genre for what it is, the greatness of this music in and of itself. I would love if we could find a way to communicate that without having to build that on the connection to rock ‘n roll. When we get in front of those (younger) audiences they dig it, but they dig the traditional kind of stuff because maybe it’s less like this classic rock stuff my parents listen too.”

“You see it with a band like GA-20. It’s a cool mix of 50’s and 60’s style blues and some soul and that intersection of the early garage rock-vibe, that makes that band so cool. I think you see that they have been able to appeal to a younger audience. There is this big audience for roots-Americana music. That’s a massive tent that covers so much musical ground. You can appeal to those people with the more traditional stuff and I think more people need to lean into that and I hope they do. Allow yourself to be cross-genre in a way that connects those things. That’s what we’re trying to do with The Damnations and Haymakers, is allow those other influences to come in in tasteful ways that you’re not trying to throw everything but the kitchen sink in there.”

For the last three years, Arbuckle has curated a blues festival in his native Kansas and it’s given him a chance to put his taste to the test and give back to deserving artists.

“I book a small festival in a tiny town called Wilson, Kansas. It’s the last weekend in September. The Midland Roots and Blues Festival. It’s at a really cool place called the Midland Railroad Hotel. It’s a historic place. It was built in the 1890’s for railroad travelers and it’s been kept up. It was a big part of the movie Paper Moon back in the 70’s. I’d love for the Midwestern blues community to check out this festival. We’ve tried to incorporate some people that aren’t exactly the kinds of acts you see on the blues festival scene, though we definitely have those bands. I think structuring some of these festivals a little more like that is not a bad thing. Maybe a country act or string band that has a little more blues flavor to it or a soul band. I’d love to see more of that. I feel like they do more of that in Europe. The festivals that are called blues festivals, but they’re really cross-genre. Blues-centric festivals that also incorporate other things that are very much connected to the blues. The Telluride Blues and Brews Festival does a really good job at that. Waterfront does that well in Portland. I think those are good blueprints. Let’s break down some of those walls.”

Check out Dustin’s website and catch a show when he is in your area at: www.dustinarbuckledamnations.com.