With age comes wisdom and experience, and at 71, Nat Dove has plenty of both. Originally from Bryan, Texas, Dove’s first memories of hearing the blues was at age 3, when he could hear the music from next door at the club through his bedroom walls. He smiles as he began to remember.
“I could hear the music, and I would listen, thinking, ‘what was it.’ Not quite knowing what blues was yet,” Dove said.
Having always had a musical background with his mother being a music teacher, he would learn to harmonize with his six other siblings. For Dove, one of the things that really pushed him toward a musical career was seeing his first moving picture.
“I went to the theater with my father and family after he came home from work saying we were going to a show. When I walked in I saw a lot of people sitting around looking at the big white screen and I started seeing horses coming straight for us! I’m thinking the people in the front row should be running. Then Two Gun Louie [Jordan], a real popular saxophonist, comes on the screen,” Dove recalled.
Dove has traveled all over the world from Paris, where he lived for several years to Tokyo, where he resided as well. In Tokyo, he taught students to play and learn music in classrooms and during a live broadcast.
While in Europe, he was interviewed extensively by Blues Unlimited magazine, giving him yet another chance to speak about his cause and reason for playing the piano to blues. He wants to make sure that its origin and true meaning doesn’t get lost to African American youth as well as America as a whole. It is a part of America’s history and the beginning basis for a lot of music today.
Dove has an extensive list of musical and educational credentials, including training students in musical composition to blues lectures for colleges and universities. He is a known and respected lecturer at Bakersfield College for the African American Literature Department as well as a guest speaking in other classes from literature to music.
Locally, Dove is a monumental figure to the arts as an educator as well as composer in the community after becoming a resident of Bakersfield since 2003. Dove founded the Bakersfield Blues Preservation Society, which was somewhat foretold by the young blues enthusiasts in 1978 and was recorded by a European magazine titled, Blues Unlimited.
“My idea is when I get back to the states, is to try and get together an organization for the preservation of Blues Arts. I plan to set it up more as an educational program and get a syndicated radio show,” Dove stated.
That same radio show he spoke of actually won the Media Award for Outstanding Accomplishments and Contribution to Bakersfield Kern County Community for the radio show “Blues Alive” in 2007 as well as the blues non-profit of the year for the Bakersfield Blues Preservation Society the same year.
Dove remembered when he first came to Bakersfield in the 1960s, and he came to perform at the Elks Lounge, which is still open to this day.
He has performed a jam session at Fishlip’s Bar and Grill for two years and also has a workshop named the ‘Blues Harp Workshop’, in which high schools around the nation learn to play instruments. Dove gives the students harmonicas to play which for some, is their first instrument.
Recently inducted into the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, Dove has also published literary works on blues and is currently working on “The Blues and I (Memoir of a Bluesman).”