When asked why he chose the stage name 'Catahoula Brown', Chris simply said, "Well...I have a Catahoula dog, and he's mostly brown...and besides, al lot of the early Blues artists had aliases...Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Hound Dog Taylor...and some of my early songs were influenced by those artists."

His earliest influence, however, came from his father Bob Weagle, who loved to sing songs by Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Hank Williams and Hank Snow (the latter was actually born near his own birthplace in Nova Scotia). As a young man, his father performed at a local radio station on Saturday afternoons. "I was no bigger than a guitar when my father taught me to play...he tuned the guitar 'Hawaiian-style', and I played it with a slide made from a butter knife, 'cause my fingers were too small to make chords."