"At first, it's incongruous: you hear the raspy, smoke-filled vocals and intricate fingerpicking guitar, songs from a life saturated with tough times, good and bad women, hard work...but instead of a stereotypical, grizzled Delta bluesman, you're looking at a lanky, fresh-faced fellow in his twenties who looks more likely to head up a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute than cover a Robert Johnson tune. (He does, however, come by the smoky vocals the old-fashioned way: some sets are equal parts playing/singing and smoking/bantering.)

Give him a minute, though, and you'll find that Brian Curran is the real deal: a masterful picker and slide player (who keeps at least three guitars onstage), gifted vocalist and devoted apprentice to the blues masters who moves seamlessly into original compositions. With a handful of other young acts, Curran is generating new interest in a homegrown blues scene that's reinventing St. Louis' storied musical past."
-- Where Magazine

At the Beale On Broadway, Brian Curran is on stage. On his break he'll come over to watch Oliver Sain (at BB's). "Oliver is a legend," he says. "He goes to Germany and people know who Oliver Sain is. We have quite a town of great musicians", Curran included, according to May.

Curran plays in the "pre-war" blues style-and that's World War II. He makes his living playing at least six gigs a week, supplementing that income with guitar lessons. On a Saturday afternoon at Mike & Mins, he sits down to talk. With long hair, a Stevie Ray Vaughn hat and an ever-present cigarette, he tries to explain how a kid who grew up in Oakville, a South County neighborhood, is now making a living playing a gritty Mississippi Delta-style guitar.

Curran has played guitar since he was 13. He grew up listening to whatever his father had on the stereo, but then he heard some John Lee Hooker, and that was that. Soon he was attending local jam sessions and hanging out at smoky bars, where the teenage Curran would play with the city's greats.

He is pleased with the St. Louis scene. "All the musicians are very supportive of each other," he says, lighting another cigarette. "Everyone is open to each other's gigs. It's cool because you get a job that pays not very much, you hang out, start talking to some cat, and they're like, 'Oh yeah, we just played this place in St. Charles. It's cool, pays $500, go check it out.' Nobody's hiding their gigs."

At the same time, he doesn't plan to spend his life eking out a living playing for the door at St. Louis clubs and making the occasional CD. "I know I'm not only going to be playing in St. Louis and a few festivals around the Midwest when I'm 30. There's no doubt about it. I want to make St. Louis my home, but I don't necessarily want to make it my career," he says. "I could make a decent living just being here in St. Louis. But then what's my music for?"

For now, it's for the patrons of Mike & Min's. Curran excuses himself, pulls an empty chair from the table and turns off the television. There are seven people in the bar, including the bartender and the cook. Curran lifts his Gibson guitar out of the case, and along with his sweet voice plays the bleating, harsh, raw blues.