In the mid-1800s, a German harmonica manufacturer named Hohner started exporting his product to North America. Being relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to play and extremely portable, the ...

Hear Brandon Bailey perform two songs live in the NPR studio. The harmonica is a staple of American blues, beginning with the Memphis jug bands of the 1920s. In the 1960s, blues-influenced artists ...

In blues, the harmonica soars. Little Walter Jacobs, who played harp for Muddy Waters, used an amplifier, creating swoops and swirls of sound. Delta giant Rice Miller, better known as Sonny Boy ...

If you ask James Montgomery if he remembers playing the Shaboo inn in Willimantic back in the day — the legendary local club that closed in 1982 — he’ll hem and haw and scratch his head and say “The ...

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John “Juke” Logan, 66, a Los Angeles-based blues harmonica player whose wailing melodies can be picked out of the theme music for the 1990s TV sitcoms “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement,” died Aug. 30 ...

For Charlie Musselwhite, the blues has been a companion, a kindred spirit that has been his love and livelihood for the last 50 years. "I've always said that blues is your comforter when you're down ...

Blues harmonica virtuoso and onetime Muddy Waters sideman James Cotton died on Thursday at a medical center in Austin of pneumonia. He was 81. A rep for the musician confirmed his death. Cotton, who ...

Back in 1991, East Bay bluesman Mark Hummel called on some of his fellow local harmonicats to help him put on a show at Ashkenaz in Berkeley. It wasn’t anything fancy — just a killer showcase for the ...

For the past few months, the great Chicago blues harmonica player Sugar Blue has been on the run – from the coronavirus. His flight has taken him from Shanghai to Milan to the mountains of Italy to ...