[Harp-L] Re:How we learned diatonic harmonica

["samblancato" <samblancato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I started to take blues harp seriously when I was 14 in Beaver PA and that
would be in about 1974.  I had fooled around with a marine band and figured
out how to bend notes but little else.  Then I met the guy who was 15 and
had been playing fairly well for 2 years.  I became good friends with the
guy - his name is Rob Wilson btw - and he taught me a little about how to
play and about tone and attack.  He turned me on to the first Paul
Butterfield album, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, John Mayall and others.  We
spent many an afternoon in my room on the 3rd floor of my parents' house
mostly just playing riffs back and forth.  As I remember we really didn't
pay too close attention to the I, IV, V progression so we weren't like
working out stuff in terms of beginnings on the I and IVs and turn-arounds,
until were about 19 or 20, at least I wasn't.  After about age 21 I didn't
pick a harp except for sporadically and I stayed like that until I was 39.
I then took it up very seriously and have been playing just about every day
since then.  

 

There was a book Rob had when we were teens by Tony "Little Son" Clover that
covered a lot of stuff about theory and stuff like tongue blocking and cross
harp.  I think in 1974 this was the only widely distributed book.  I bought
a book about Sonny Terry that had a little floppy phonograph record in it
showing some of Sonny's techniques.  I also think I bought a book by Howard
Levy although I don't remember the title.  This book also had a little
floppy record that you could play and hear some demo stuff.  There was a
solo played with a combo doing Joni Mitchell's "Raised on Robbery"  and I
can remember that I wasn't too impressed with either the record or the book;
this material wasn't really saying anything that I was really interested in
and I think a great deal of it was over my head at the time.  Those were the
materials and experiences that shaped my early playing and all in all I have
to say that I really didn't take the harp too seriously.  I don't think the
concept of 3rd position ever entered my mind until I was in my late
twenties.  All I know was cross harp.

 

One other thing I do have to say about those days is about how I perceived
blues players at that time.  When I was a little kid of say, eight or nine
there were these older guys I used to see from time to time, when they
crossed my path, that were from poor parts of town or from Beaver Falls or
New Brighton, or from Pittsburgh when I went stay with my Nana in the
summer.  I'm talking about low life types that at the time grownups called
'hoods'.  As a teenager I had very long hair and listened to Jethro Tull and
Cat Stevens and guys like that.  So when I first took a look the guys on the
cover of "The Paul Butterfield Blues Band" I thought they looked like a
bunch of real hoods.  I thought their pose and their style of dress was
really low-life.  I thought the pictures I had seen of Muddy Waters with his
conked hair were really weird too.  My older sisters looked at these album
covers when I brought the records down to listen to them on my parents
Admiral, console, stereo, and said stuff like, "who the hell are these
sleazy guys?" (My sisters were into James Taylor and Leonard Cohen Randy
Newman and Elton John.  So I had these really childish prejudices about the
guys who played the music.  I was pretty young and ignorant, although at the
time I thought I was one hip dude.   Ah, the deep stupidity of youth.

 

 

 

Sam Blancato, Pittsburgh