Re: [Harp-L] JOHNNY PULEO and the HARMONICA GANG on You Tube

[nonidesign@xxxxxxx]

Johnny Puleo is one of the coolest harmonica players ever. He went from being Borah Minnevich's indentured slave to playing on the Milton Berle show. Not bad for a guy about as tall as his harmonica.

And doesn't look like a blast to hang out with?

I'm a chicago blues style diatonic guy but I love the music of the Harmonicats, Puleo, Borah (mostly) chromatic harmonica players/bands. The shamltzier the better. "Lady of Spain"? "Top Cat"? Saber Dance"? Bring it on!
As mentioned in another post, these players could play their butts off. It was because they HAD to play well to please tough audiences who might only know them from their live performances (no MP3 downloads, You Tube, or stream radio, etc. for them). They weren't harmonica players as much as they were entertainers who played harmonicas.

I live in the same area of Northwest Indiana as Bud Boblink, a harmonica player from that tradition,  and just happened to see him at a local fair a couple of years ago. He was set-up under a small canopy on the grounds away from the main stage playing his harmonicas, making balloon animals for the kids, doing magic tricks, cracking jokes, and giving a small crowd of maybe fifteen people a great time. The kids (of the video game generation) were enthralled. They absolutely loved it. He was a player, a performer, and most importantly an entertainer. His outgoing personality and easy going demeanor were so endearing as to seem unreal.  It wasn't.  He is a genuinely nice person who was plying his trade with great skill and working the audience "like ya read about, bubby". 
As I watched him it occured to me that his type of harmonica performance had it's beginnings in settings very similar to the one I was enjoying. His show harkened back to a period of the harmonica's history that was probably the peak of the instrument's popularity in America and at the core of vaudeveille's history as well. 
What struck me was how evident the entertainment aspect of his show was and how similar it was to a lot of the variety show performances I saw on TV as a child. I didn't realize it as a kid, but those plate spinners, slapstick acts, magicians, etc. on shows like Show of Shows, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Lawrence Welk, Milton Berle and heck, even Bozo's Circus and The Tonight Show, were mostly all performers who had paid their dues playing live vaudeville. 

The "shtick" of Puleo and his Gang dressing up like vagrant orphans (from his days in Borah's Rascals vaudeville act) was what the vaudeville audiences loved. It gave them a way to expand the act beyond the music. Hell, even the use of a "person of diminutive height" (is that how they say it these days?) for comic effect is still around (remember "Mini Me"?). 
Seeing Puleo on YouTube is, if nothing else, a slightly altered view of what harmonica group acts were like back in the day when they did it on the vaudeville circuit. You don't see a lot of that style of entertainment much anymore (for better or worse depending on taste), but shtick or not, it is part of the fabric of American entertainment and cultural history. 

And it was, in its day....."cool".     ;-)