[Harp-L] My harmonica book in works, harmonica history question

["Dave Payne Sr." <payneoutdoors@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm writing a harmonica instruction book that I'll print up and sell to my harp students, or whoever else wants to buy one. I write for a living, so I'm mostly doing it for enjoyment. 
   
  The instruction book will have some appendices, including a pretty lengthy history of blues harmonica. I'd like to run my conjectures by y'all and get your thoughts on how the blues harp developed.
  I've been researching  the early 1900s harmonica scene, mostly by listening to recordings from the 1920s, which give a decent picture of what the national scene was like because of the traveling recordings. 
   
  O.K., here's a nutshell conclusion I've drawn over about five years:
The picture I get is that in the 1920s, there were competeting styles from two hot spots of blues, the West Virginia/Virginia coalfields where blacks came up during World War I to work and the Deep South/Delta. I hear two vastly different approaches in cross harp and a very refined straight harp blues out of Appalachia, the best being Gwen Foster on that straight-harp blues especially. I hear more blow bends in appalachia than draw, more draw than bend in the south. I hear more white bluesman from Appalachia than anywhere else in this time period. I hear far more whites with the blues in Appalachia than anywhere else.  
  I also get the idea that musicians were more varied by playing different styles and not seeing themselves tied to  a genre, if they even knew or cared what that was. It looks to me like the harmonica wasn't a blues staple in the 1920s, although it was used in blues.
   
  I also conclude for the most part that harp players didn't have a lot of harps. Frank Hutchison, a WV coal miner and the first white man to record a blues song, was an excellent harp player and he played in all sorts of keys, except on harp songs. They are ALL in C. That leads me to think that even with him being so accomplished on the harp, he only owned one. 
  Frank is an interesting study. He listened to embryonic blues as a kid from an old black man who lived in the woods in southern West Virginia. I say embryonic because the guy was old then and playing preblues from the mid 1800s. Frank also listened to, played with and worked in the mines with numerous black musicians. Listening to his 12-bar blues and hearing the blues influence in his non-12-bar stuff shows a remarkable variety of blues influence, which is a good illustration of the variety of blues in Appalachia at that time from all the blacks coming up to work in the coal mines that fueled the steel mills, naval ships, etc. in World War I. I can hear some delta in him, some piedmont, some things I just can't explain.  
  Despite the fact he is talented enough to do anything he wants on a harmonica, he never makes the connection of blues and harmonica and uses the harp for only non-blues stuff. yet, all the skills are there to do it  --- He plays a train piece that paints an auditory picture of a train leaving a station, using his voice through  the harp for various sounds, etc. He shows he can bend and bend well in that piece by bending notes down to make his various train whistles, etc. 
   
  Over the years, I've grown to think that what we would consider ''true'' blues harp today didn't truly evolve until that generation that went to Chicago during World War II. I also get the picture that the development of the blues harp is similar to the development of revolutionary things going on with the harp today, not everybody's doing it, some players have never even heard one. If you could imagine what it would be like if the overblow were developing without the internet and without Harp L, that's how I see the early 20th Century blues harp. 
   
  I tell you what though, you can learn a lot from 1920s harp style. 


__________________________________________________________________
Dave Payne Sr. 
Journalist and writer
1114 Charles St. 
Parkersburg, WV 26101
       
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