Good times — risk-taking musician, his harmonica and the stage

By Jerry Fink

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It was love at first sight for “Suzie Q” and “Harmonica Red” at the 1984 Possum Town Pig Festival in Columbus, Miss.

Suzie was a microbiologist standing in the audience. Red had the harmonica, playing onstage with Terrance Simien’s zydeco band.

“She was an Ole Miss graduate and I was a graduate of LSU. It was kind of like mixing Tabasco sauce and water,” George Harmonica Red Heard said by phone from Frankfort, Ky.

Suzanne and George Heard have been married 23 years. They’ve been through tough times, not unusual for a blues musician’s family. But when she had a heart attack and stroke three years ago in New Orleans, it almost ended his career.

“When something like that happens to somebody close to you it changes your priorities, but my wife forced me to stay on the road and keep playing music,” says Heard, who will perform at Boulder Station’s Railhead Lounge today as part of the Boulder Blues Series.

Giving up music would have been the ultimate sacrifice for the 51-year-old native of Baton Rouge, La., who has performed with musicians as varied as David Allan Coe, B.B. King, Wynton Marsalis and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown.

A few months after his wife’s stroke, Hurricane Katrina further eroded their lives. They joined the exodus from Southern Louisiana, ending up in Frankfort, Ky.

They struggled to get back on their feet after losing everything to the storm. Heard says he slept in his van until he found an apartment so his wife could join him. Local musicians found him a weekly gig jamming at a tavern 50 miles away in Louisville.

But he keeps traveling the country playing the blues. When he isn’t on tour, he’s a substitute teacher in Frankfort, teaching preschool through high school.

“It’s like being onstage,” Heard says. “You’ve got an audience that you’ve got to entertain, you’ve got to control.”

From math to history, he often finds ways to bring music into the classroom.

“What I’m trying to do is whatever class I’m in I’m trying to show how these things apply to their real life,” Heard says. “I try to keep it simple. I might break out the harmonica and play and sing for them.”

Heard became a harmonica player by default. He loved music but he was short growing up. At 15, he was 4 feet 8 inches and weighed 175 pounds.

“I was a butterball,” he says. “I tried every instrument there was, but my hands were so tiny I couldn’t get them around a guitar. I couldn’t keep a good, steady beat with my hands, so I couldn’t play the drums. My hands were so tiny I couldn’t play piano.

“Then a buddy gave me a harmonica.”

It was a perfect fit. In a couple of weeks he was playing songs. Within six months he was playing in a band — the Bottleneck Blues Band in Baton Rouge.

“I’d come home with $150 in my pocket, which was more than both my parents brought home all week,” Heard says. “They changed their mind about not wanting me to be a musician.”

He says at the time he didn’t feel he needed to study music, just to play it.

“My ear was so good I thought I could play without studying,” he says. “My first studio session, I couldn’t read music. I got through it, but it was really tough. Somebody would play the music for me and as soon as they played it I picked it up fast.”

Heard went to Nashville to be a session musician and was befriended by Charlie McCoy, who played harmonica for Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley. “He took me under his wing and he said I needed a music education if I wanted to go any further.”

So Heard left Nashville and wound up in Pasadena, Texas, south of Houston. “I’d play country and western swing at night at Gilley’s and during the day, at San Jacinto (Community College), I’d play blues, jazz and big band music.”

Eventually he graduated from Louisiana State University and hit the road, performing 200 to 250 dates a year and recording. His latest album is “I Was Born in Louisiana,” which cost him $3,000 to produce and drained his bank account.

“It’s been hard times since Katrina. I haven’t made much money and I have to be careful about what I put it into,” he says. “But the music sounded good enough to go ahead and put it out. I’m not in it for the money, though I’d like to make some.

“I’m happy when I’m playing music, and when I’m happy, my wife is happy — and when she’s happy, that’s the most important thing to me.”