![]() ![]() When African Americans picked up the instrument in the 20th-century, they completely transformed it into something it had never been intended to be played as in Europe. ![]() Recently we talked to Pearson about the album, and below is an excerpt of our conversation, in which he discusses playing the harmonica backwards, the instrument’s voice-like qualities and the importance of making any instrument speak your own language.Īs a teacher, I found the harmonica to have one of the most interesting traditions. In Classic Harmonica Blues, out May 21 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, producers Barry Lee Pearson and Jeff Place capture the last century’s most talented players on 20 tracks from the Folkways archive and from live recordings made at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The cheap and portable instrument was made by Germans for use in traditional European waltzes and marches, but when it made its way to America’s Southern neighborhoods, black musicians began to develop a totally new way of playing, which bent the harmonica’s sound (quite literally) to fit the style of the country’s increasingly popular “devil’s music,” or rather, the blues. ![]() In the early 20th-century, southern black musicians found the devil in the harmonica.
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