[Harp-L] Civil War



All quotes are from Smokey Joe, first:

"Who IS Alan Bates?"


Others have answered, but I felt like pointing out that a simple google search of "Alan Bates Harmonica" turns this up as the first entry:


http://www.usd.edu/smm/Batespage.htm

The bare minimum amount of looking things up before dismissing someone's lifetime of work would seem to be not beyond the scope of civility, IMO.


"I consider myself a fair hand at history. Certainly no expert, but well read nonetheless. In my life time, I have many times seen cases where what we were lead to believe about history, turns out to be bogus. It's all in the hands of the writer and it seems that the winner gets the opportunity to write as THEY see it, while the looser can only sit there discredited. After all, they DID loose, didn't they? so why should we believe THEM?"



Because they know more than you. Because this is their life's work. Because they actually understand the concepts behind the study of history that have lead to the rethinking and rewriting of traditional history. Much like why we should listen to an actual economist on matters of economics rather than someone who watches CNBC. Or an actual chemist rather than someone who runs a meth lab.



"I have never heard of 'many', but there ARE remains at Gettysburg. Gettysburg was very late in the war. BTW, no one has ever proven who made them OR what country they are from. The importation of harmonicas was stated as being early 60s. That means 61, 62, & 63. Gettysburg wasn't till 65."



No. The Battle of Gettysburg was in 1863, smack dab in the middle of the Civil War and before the second Presidential election and the Emancipation Proclamation--it is widely considered as being pivotal to both those events. I didn't remember the exact dates, but that's another thing Google can find very easily--it was July 1st, 2nd and 3rd of 1863.


That said, Smokey Joe does have a good point about not being sure when harmonicas found at the various battlegrounds are from. In part this is because it would take a level of archeological diligence rarely seen amongst amatuers (and nothing wrong with that) to properly authenticate most of these items. As he says, a harmonica which has been buried since 1883 is going to look quite old, essentially as aged as one buried twenty years earlier. That's why further research into areas of availability (through both sales records and written evidence via letters, newspapers and such), design (if the instrument is of a design not made in 1863, for instance, that pretty much rules it out) and so forth. I don't know if that's been done with the Alan Bates collection, but I'm willing to defer active skepticism as Mr. Bates knows a lot more about the specifics of harmonica model history than I do--by a wide margin (again, that's why we should listen to what he has to say more than, say, me).


"I was never convinced that the harmonica WAS a German invention anyway. It seems quite possible to me that 49ers in the gold fields could have dropped harmonicas in Sutter's creek that were CHINESE. No, not made IN China, made by an Chinese man (for his children) after he had just done his 16 hour shift in the laundry."



? The Western free-reed bears little resemblance in terms of construction to the East-Asian free-reed (one is heteroglottal, the other idioglottal--assuming I'm not butchering the words; one has the reed cut from the same material as the plate, the other the reed is a separate entity mounted on the reed-plate). Given that, I think it no more likely that the hobbyist (usually people with spare time and money to spend on materials) would be Chinese than any other ethnicity--actually, I think it less likely based on the nature of a labor and time intensive hobby like making harmonicas in one's spare time--more something for the middle-class than the very downtrodden Chines immigrants of the time.


The Western free-reed spread very rapidly in the early 19th century throughout Europe and America, though origins of this design are very hard to pinpoint. It's very hard to find any real evidence as to who made the first mouth-blown instrument we might recognize as a harmonica, but it seems like a fairly simultaneous development of the free-reed principal can be seen in many countries (including the various central European German states, France, Britain and the US). Single-country origins, and a Germanic one at that, might have more to do with the nationalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the subsequent dominance of German manufacturers than actual history.


On the National Music Museum and the Alan Bates' collections ending up there:



"Oh, ok, that's cool, BUT suddenly I am now struck with the question South Dakota? I suppose it was a monetay consideration, but I don't really see SoDak as a Mecca for harmonicas. Seems pretty far from the general population."



To quote from the museum's web page:


"In about 1997, Alan decided the collection was too important to break up by selling the harmonicas individually, as he had done with the coins and tools. Then began a search for the best museum in which to house them. National Music Museum came out far ahead of the other candidates and the commitment was made. In late April 2000, museum director Dr. André P. Larson drove to Delaware in a University van. He and Alan loaded scores of boxes and several large display cases. Off went the collection on a 1,300 mile trek to South Dakota."


When collectors give donations to museums there are many criteria. This museum has a very good reputation for, amongst other things, displaying their collection rather than storing much of it. Many more prominent museums location-wise (the MFA in Boston, the Met in New York--to name two with significant musical instrument collections) would at best display one or two items and store the rest--occasionally rising for an exhibit once every fifty years. I haven't been there, but it sounds like a decent showing--they list 60 instruments on display. That's a tiny fraction of the total, but orders of magnitude more than the two museums I mentioned would be showing.





()() JR "Bulldogge" Ross () () & Snuffy, too:) `----'








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