Re: [Harp-L] How we learned diatonic harmonica in the "olden days"

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

At the age of fourteen and-a-half, after playing electric kazoo in a 
basement blues band for about six months, I started to feel faintly 
embarrassed and decided I should get a harmonica to play that two-
note lick in the Cream version of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful." I asked 
a guy at school about it and he said, "Get a C-harp. That's a good 
key." So I did. Luckily, the two notes in Spoonful are E and G, both 
of which are readily available on a C-harp. So I started out playing 
in fifth position. But when I tried to play chords over blues in E it 
sounded weird. Cream had another harmonica-heavy recording in E, Jack 
Bruce's live solo on "Traintime", also in E on an A-harp, and I could 
tell that my chords were not his, but how was he getting those better-
sounding chords?

I had noticed how curiously good the C -harp sounded on a tune in G, 
but I still wasn't convinced that this was what I was looking for. 
After all, how do you get blue notes in Hole 6 and above if you can't 
bend the right notes? Finally a guy in a music store told me about 
crossharp (second position). That Christmas there was an A-harp in my 
stocking. From there I added D and G harps. Meanwhile I had noticed 
how curiously good the C -harp sounded on a tune in G.

A lot of my evenings were spent hanging out at friend's houses and in 
cars over whatever recreational consumables were available, and my 
squawking experiments seemed to meet with no resistance from 
companions. This, and playing in the hallways between classes at 
school, allowed me to concentrate on rapid improvement.

Pretty soon I was on my way, and started hearing Little Walter, Alan 
Wilson, Butterfield, Musselwhite - his barn-burning attack on 
the "Stone Blues" album was a big eye-opener, especially for third 
position, Sonny Boys I and II, Sonny Terry, Big Walter, Cotton, 
Wells, the Wolf, whoever was playing with Bo Diddley (turned out much 
later it was Billy Boy Arnold), Charlie McCoy as part of the eclectic 
Area Code 615 band. I was on my way . . .

I did eventually find Tony Glover's book. By then I already knew more 
than the book had to offer on harp technique and could even spot the 
errors, but it was a lot of fun to read and the pictures and history 
were great, along with the witticisms and the general feeling of 
support it lent to this lunacy called blues harp.

Then I discovered the chromatic . . . 

Winslow


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