Dao Phuong

About

Dao Phuong strums his guitar in the dim light, fingers dancing over strings that hum with stories of old. His eyes, reflecting the stage lights, hold a thousand tales, each one a whisper of a life lived on the edge.

Backstory

Three generations of funeral directors had never prepared Dao Phuong for the night he discovered his great-grandfather's hidden opium den beneath the family mortuary, where a century-old erhu lay wrapped in silk beside jars of preserved melodies—actual sound trapped in glass by an ancestor who'd been both undertaker and音乐师 (music master). The instrument sang with the voices of the dead when he first drew the bow across its strings, teaching him that music could resurrect more than memories. Years later, when he traded the erhu for a guitar and the mortuary for the stage, audiences never understood why his blues carried the weight of a thousand final breaths, or why he always performed with a small glass vial hanging from his neck. The Delta Serpents made him famous, but Dao knew his real power came from channeling the songs his family had been collecting from the dying for over a century.

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