WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.822
Pat Missin joins me on episode 115.
00:00:03.426 --> 00:00:11.641
Pat's knowledge about the harmonica is unsurpassed, with his website at patmissin.com, a definitive source of information for over 20 years.
00:00:12.342 --> 00:00:22.920
He gives us an insight in some of this knowledge, starting with how free-read instruments were the predecessor of the harmonica, and the questionable history of who actually invented the harmonica as we know it today.
00:00:24.065 --> 00:00:33.396
We also discuss various harmonica recording firsts, such as the first blues harmonica song recorded, the first, second and third position and chromatic recording.
00:00:34.417 --> 00:00:43.805
Pat was also one of the earlier exponents on exploring harmonica tuning schemes and has released some songbooks for harmonica, as well as some on other three-reed instruments.
00:00:46.109 --> 00:00:48.570
This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonicas.
00:00:48.991 --> 00:00:58.332
Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.zidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidel Harmonicas.
00:01:25.186 --> 00:01:27.069
Hello, Pat Missin, and welcome to the podcast.
00:01:27.709 --> 00:01:29.090
Hi, it's good to be here.
00:01:29.831 --> 00:01:33.236
Pat, you are originally from England, but now living in the US,
00:01:33.316 --> 00:01:34.838
yeah?
00:01:34.899 --> 00:01:35.459
That's true.
00:01:35.480 --> 00:01:43.030
I grew up in sunny Kingston-upon-Hull, and I'm now living in even more sunny rural Ohio.
00:01:43.870 --> 00:01:50.439
Long story short, I've been in America just coming up 24 years, so not quite half my life.
00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:52.042
Not enough to lose the accent.
00:01:52.942 --> 00:01:54.686
So what prompted the move to the US?
00:01:55.266 --> 00:01:57.128
He got married to an American woman.
00:01:57.548 --> 00:01:58.828
Not for harmonica reasons then?
00:01:59.469 --> 00:02:02.331
Well, she was one of my customers, which was how I met her.
00:02:03.233 --> 00:02:06.516
I worked on some harmonicas for her and we hit it off.
00:02:07.156 --> 00:02:07.977
That old trick, eh?
00:02:08.116 --> 00:02:09.117
Working on harmonicas.
00:02:09.699 --> 00:02:10.419
Works every time.
00:02:10.459 --> 00:02:12.001
They work for me.
00:02:13.401 --> 00:02:21.808
So you are a renowned person with great knowledge of the harmonica and certainly your website is one of the greatest resources on harmonica.
00:02:22.569 --> 00:02:27.054
Moving to the US, did you find a good harmonica scene there?
00:02:27.093 --> 00:02:29.235
How did it compare to Sunny Hill?
00:02:29.736 --> 00:02:29.977
Well,
00:02:30.197 --> 00:02:48.977
one of the things that was big in the early 2000s, I married in 2000 and initially lived in Baltimore and then spent some time in Chicago and finally wound up kind of in the middle of nowhere in Southeast Ohio, but not too long a drive from where we are is Columbus.
00:02:49.598 --> 00:03:00.870
And in the early 2000s, well, I actually started long before then, but in the early 2000s, the big harmonica congregation was for the Buckeye Harmonica Festival at Columbus, Ohio.
00:03:01.110 --> 00:03:08.437
That wasn't the reason we moved here, but certainly for the first few years we were living here, there was a lot happening up in Columbus.
00:03:08.518 --> 00:03:21.352
I was at several of the VHF festivals there, and they attracted the same kind of crowd that you would get at spa or something like that, so a wide variety of players and a lot of people who know each other and whatever.
00:03:21.412 --> 00:03:25.836
So from a harmonica standpoint, that was going on not too far away.
00:03:25.877 --> 00:03:34.306
But in the immediate vicinity, it's like fields, deer, some cattle here and there, and not a great deal else.
00:03:35.187 --> 00:03:37.729
I don't wish to portray the area in any way negative.
00:03:37.789 --> 00:03:40.111
That's why I'm still living here 20 years later.
00:03:40.572 --> 00:03:43.496
But not a lot happening in the way of the music scene.
00:03:43.776 --> 00:03:44.135
Sure, yeah.
00:03:44.175 --> 00:03:46.739
So is that Buckeye Festival still go on?
00:03:47.199 --> 00:03:48.320
I think there's something going on.
00:03:48.721 --> 00:03:56.689
Certainly there's a guy called Danny G who runs an online harmonica business and has quite a few get-togethers and things at his place.
00:03:56.729 --> 00:03:59.772
And I think he's kind of taking over the Buckeye thing.
00:03:59.812 --> 00:04:02.816
I know he took up the Ohio State Harmonica Championships.
00:04:02.836 --> 00:04:04.138
That's one of the things he now does.
00:04:04.557 --> 00:04:06.439
So what about you going back to the early days?
00:04:06.460 --> 00:04:06.901
What got you
00:04:06.920 --> 00:04:07.661
into the harmonica?
00:04:08.322 --> 00:04:15.270
Kind of indirectly, I wanted to be a pop star or a cool musician or, you know, do something.
00:04:15.870 --> 00:04:27.985
And not being blessed with the world's greatest singing voice or ability to write catchy songs, I figured what I would do would be I'd be the guy who played all the cool stuff in the band.
00:04:28.026 --> 00:04:29.569
I'd be able to play any instrument.
00:04:30.411 --> 00:04:32.915
One of the things was trying to play as many instruments as I could.
00:04:32.956 --> 00:04:40.170
And being a teenager and finances being limited, that meant cheaper instruments kind of came first.
00:04:40.672 --> 00:04:43.137
My first serious instrument was guitar, because obviously...
00:04:43.458 --> 00:04:47.021
You want to be a pop star, you've got to at least be able to pose with a guitar.
00:04:47.521 --> 00:04:51.064
And then, not sure if keyboards came next or harmonica.
00:04:51.084 --> 00:04:52.105
Harmonica, possibly.
00:04:52.125 --> 00:04:55.668
And again, because it was another instrument to play and cheap.
00:04:55.829 --> 00:05:03.636
Oh, I managed to get a bass of disputed provenance at a suspiciously low price as well, so I was playing bass around that.
00:05:04.495 --> 00:05:12.463
And the harmonica was just like one of the other things I was going to play while I was in this chart-topping supergroup that never actually happened.
00:05:13.244 --> 00:05:23.680
I get I guess as I got more into my late teens and into my twenties, the thing was, you know, everybody played guitar, so bands weren't looking for guitarists.
00:05:24.418 --> 00:06:29.697
gradually the harmonica was not the instrument that everyone played and especially as I learned how to use the harmonica as you know substitute for keyboards or a horn section or you know something to add those touches around a band and then in my mid-20s I was quite ill for an extended period saxophone was the first thing to go because I played alto and that just requires you to be in marathon runner like condition to be able to play whereas the harmonica i could actually lie down on on the floor on a bed or on the sofa or whatever and play with you know zero expenditure of energy so that just became the most convenient instrument for me to play and then it all kind of grew from there actually before I was ill and that physically became the easiest instrument for me to play.
00:06:29.737 --> 00:06:44.158
One night, I was still at high school, so I'd be maybe 16, already played guitar, but already got some kind of interest in blues and early R&B and rock and roll and stuff.
00:06:44.959 --> 00:06:56.744
And I learned to play the guitar, one of the obvious starting points, at least seemed obvious to me was Chuck Berry as being like the backbone of a lot of modern music guitar styles.
00:06:57.685 --> 00:07:00.848
And Bo Deadly, you don't have to worry about chords too much.
00:07:01.488 --> 00:07:14.579
You know, you just found that one or two, maybe two chords using a tune and the rest of it was getting the rhythm together, getting the synchronization between left and right hands and really getting the feel for the groove.
00:07:15.139 --> 00:07:21.526
So there would have been harmonica on there and I was a huge, I woke up Johnson fan, the original Dr.
00:07:21.547 --> 00:07:22.468
Phil Good guitarist.
00:07:22.749 --> 00:07:24.612
So they had records with Harmonica on it.
00:07:33.644 --> 00:07:38.932
So I was kind of aware of it from then, and there were a whole bunch of pop tunes with Harmonica on it.
00:07:39.975 --> 00:07:41.557
So it was a very familiar sound.
00:07:42.177 --> 00:07:54.610
Well, one night I was listening to the John Peel show on late night radio on and at 1145 he stops talking and this distant crackly sound comes in and voice says,
00:07:54.629 --> 00:07:56.031
baby don't go yet.
00:07:56.112 --> 00:07:57.533
It's only a quarter to 12.
00:08:09.184 --> 00:08:09.985
I was immediately wow.
00:08:11.394 --> 00:08:12.636
That's a really cool sound.
00:08:12.675 --> 00:08:16.041
That wasn't a sound I'd associated that much with the harmonica.
00:08:16.062 --> 00:08:18.747
I mean, I must have heard, you know, Billy Boy Arnold.
00:08:19.247 --> 00:08:22.492
I'd certainly heard guys like Lee Brello and Lou Lewis.
00:08:22.894 --> 00:08:25.257
But this was just something.
00:08:25.298 --> 00:08:36.496
The pacing of it, the fact that it wasn't like frantic British pub rock speed, and the reverb, like the whole sound of the studio back then, really...
00:08:36.929 --> 00:08:39.434
got my attention just as I was dozing off in bed.
00:08:39.955 --> 00:08:46.307
And I obviously must have played some harmonica already at this point because I definitely recall the thought of, wow, that sounds incredible.
00:08:46.807 --> 00:08:50.534
And, you know, this instrument has like 10 holes and it's either blow or draw.
00:08:50.575 --> 00:08:52.979
That's only 20 notes and the rest are bends.
00:08:53.580 --> 00:08:54.942
I couldn't figure out how to do this.
00:08:55.504 --> 00:08:58.708
This wasn't like a guitar with like six strings and 20...
00:08:59.169 --> 00:09:05.092
two frets or whatever, a keyboard with like, you know, octave after octave of black and white keys.
00:09:05.214 --> 00:09:09.028
And this was like something that's a few inches long and it's got like 10 holes in it.
00:09:09.474 --> 00:09:42.727
and you did go ahead to figure it out in great detail and again I mentioned your website is a great resource and it shows the sort of level of detail and depth you went in to look into it so we touched on in the last podcast episode with Seth Schumacher talking about the early history of the harmonica and some of the plays so you've looked into this a lot with the history of mouth blown free reed instruments so let's talk about that first and you've provided information on the various free reed instruments that came before or free reed So tell us about them and when did you get interested in those?
00:09:42.768 --> 00:09:47.258
Was it earlier on or was it later on when you started getting your knowledge of harmonica grown?
00:09:47.317 --> 00:09:49.163
That was later.
00:09:49.182 --> 00:09:53.211
I mean, I'd been interested in all sorts of instruments.
00:09:54.114 --> 00:10:01.880
just like instruments in general, and especially the more obscure they were, the more they kind of intrigued me.
00:10:02.740 --> 00:10:17.774
But no, that really didn't come along until later when I was looking at more historical stuff to do with the harmonica, and there was the simplification that the harmonica is inspired by this East Asian instrument which uses free reeds and bamboo tubes and things.
00:10:18.414 --> 00:10:22.778
And I thought around that point, I should at least get one and see how it works.
00:10:23.499 --> 00:10:31.125
So initially The understanding of that is that it was the xian, which is kind of popularly thought to be the predecessor to the harmonica.
00:10:31.245 --> 00:10:31.326
Yeah.
00:10:45.378 --> 00:10:52.965
Well, the information on your site certainly talks about other free-read instruments which came before the Sheng, did they, and developed into that, yeah.
00:10:53.644 --> 00:10:59.831
I mean, it's actually a modernised version of an instrument that could have been made in the Stone Age.
00:11:00.071 --> 00:11:05.534
It didn't actually require necessarily metalworking abilities to make them.
00:11:05.995 --> 00:11:18.326
And, of course, there's nothing in the way of historical evidence of instruments that could have been made from bamboo and dried gourds and things that generally do not stand the test of time quite as well as metal.
00:11:18.628 --> 00:11:38.428
There's tended to be a bias towards the Chinese instruments, mainly because China was like a big, powerful country, and credit was given to them for ideas that might not actually have happened in mainland China, more likely to have come out of Southeast Asia, places that don't have quite the documented history that China has.
00:11:38.948 --> 00:12:26.683
I did find, and this has been a recurrent theme in a lot of my research into this, that most of the stuff you you think you know really is an oversimplification or in some cases a fabrication for various reasons but you know the standard history of the harmonica is it's derived from this Chinese instrument it was invented by Bushman and then Hohner took over production I was going to say whilst it's not inaccurate bits of it actually are rather inaccurate or at least unprovable and it it's more than anything else a gross oversimplification of something very complex that for the most part was not being documented at the time so there's very little history for us to to work with
00:12:27.283 --> 00:12:59.100
yeah so i'll try and decipher what i understand for your website which is probably hugely simplified you can help fill in the details and of course people can go and read the great info on your website to get more information but so from what i understand it there's these early sort of free pipe reed instruments which developed and then we had the western version and the first version of that was by uh probably pronounce his name wrong so please correct me uh christian gotlieb kratzenstein who made a sort of speaking machine which which replicated the sound of the voice using what was that free reed instruments again
00:12:59.542 --> 00:13:11.769
that was a free reed connected to um a series of resonators to give the different vowel sounds It is not certain, and I'm not sure it's provable, that he was directly inspired by ancient instruments to do that.
00:13:11.850 --> 00:13:20.299
It could have been he just had the idea independently, or he stumbled across it, or someone stumbled across it and showed it to him, and he developed it from there.
00:13:20.980 --> 00:14:01.907
Because one of the big differences, and again, simplification, but most of the ancient free-grade instruments, the traditional ones, and the western free reed instruments such as the harmonica and the accordion the reed organ harmonium things like that is how the reed is actually made in most of the the traditional asian instruments the reed is cut from surrounding plates so the reed and the reed plates are actually one unit and there's two or three cuts to to make a reed that is capable of vibrating through the whole left by cutting it that's a terrible explanation.
00:14:02.967 --> 00:14:04.629
Better to look at the pictures on my website.
00:14:04.649 --> 00:14:07.051
I'm sure there's something that illustrates it better.
00:14:07.731 --> 00:14:15.418
And they usually, because of how they're set, they usually require an additional resonator of some sort to get the reed to speak clearly.
00:14:15.899 --> 00:14:51.287
Whereas the Western version, you have a reed and a reed plate, there are slots cut in the reed plate, and the reeds are fixed in some fashion so that they are to one side of the plate, which means they usually only respond to changes in air pressure at one side of the plate rather than the other so you have blow reeds or draw reeds on harmonica which normally only respond to one direction of breath and the same with an accordion with the push the bellows and pull the bellows the way that is set up they don't actually require their own resonators, so the instrument suddenly becomes way more portable.
00:14:51.347 --> 00:14:53.529
You don't have to have all these specially tuned pipes.
00:14:53.570 --> 00:15:00.539
You can have lots and lots of reeds that all just vibrate in their own airstream quite happily as long as the players are playing out to them.
00:15:00.860 --> 00:15:03.364
They don't actually need anything else to make them speak properly.
00:15:03.384 --> 00:15:16.902
That is the big difference between most of the traditional Asian reeds and the ones we're familiar with over here, the more modern ones, which really only go back to a couple of hundred years, a bit more than that.
00:15:17.601 --> 00:15:18.982
Here's a word from my sponsor.
00:15:19.423 --> 00:15:20.605
Looking for a new harmonica?
00:15:20.644 --> 00:15:23.767
Or maybe you just want to replace the replates on an existing harp?
00:15:24.207 --> 00:15:27.951
Theharmonicacompany.com is a place to go for all your harmonica needs.
00:15:28.530 --> 00:15:39.280
They stock a wide range of harmonicas and accessories from all of the major manufacturers and always ensure that they ship quickly, offer excellent customer service and are super competitive on price.
00:15:39.780 --> 00:15:47.427
Go to theharmonicacompany.com and enter the code HAPPYHOUR7 at the checkout to get an additional 7% off the already low prices.
00:15:47.567 --> 00:16:10.917
have a question or need advice just drop Jonathan a line on sales at theharmonicacompany.com and he'll be happy to help the discount code and email address are also listed on the podcast page So another thing that you talk about on your website is who invented the harmonica as we know it today, so the sort of Western version that we all, that became what the harmonicas we play today.
00:16:11.357 --> 00:16:20.966
So a contender is a 16-year-old Christian Buschmann in 1821 who made the aura or a mandolin.
00:16:21.005 --> 00:16:23.327
So is that, do you think, the first harmonica?
00:16:23.368 --> 00:16:27.511
You talk about there's other sort of contenders that may have been who actually invented it, yeah.
00:16:28.072 --> 00:16:35.278
There are other contenders, and this is where we get into one of the things that Well, who actually did invent the harmonic?
00:16:35.318 --> 00:16:36.139
Let's look at this.
00:16:36.821 --> 00:16:39.764
The more I sort of picked to that thread, the more things unraveled.
00:16:40.244 --> 00:16:53.759
One of the key things about the Bushman story is they say he was granted a patent when a patent back then was essentially you got some local nobleman or a member of royalty to go, yeah, we're granting you a patent.
00:16:53.818 --> 00:16:55.259
I'll just sign this piece of paper.
00:16:55.561 --> 00:16:58.604
Basically, a patent back then was an IOU from someone important.
00:16:58.943 --> 00:17:02.447
So we don't actually have any documentation of the patent.
00:17:02.447 --> 00:17:04.170
he is supposed to have.
00:17:04.971 --> 00:17:08.013
We don't have any surviving instruments.
00:17:08.034 --> 00:17:10.537
We don't have any surviving illustrations of the instruments.
00:17:10.576 --> 00:17:13.299
We just have a few things from letters within the family.
00:17:14.260 --> 00:17:37.625
And the more I looked into this, most of the documentation of that came from one book that was published in 1938 in Germany, in the middle of very strong political opinions, compiled by members of the portray the harmonica as this very German invention by the wonderfully amazing German people.
00:17:37.665 --> 00:17:48.439
And so a lot of things were downplayed in the story, like the fact that a lot of the early history of the harmonica in Europe is actually from Austria rather than Germany itself.
00:17:49.200 --> 00:17:56.909
Certainly most of the production was not in places like Berlin, it was in what was for a time East Germany, Bavaria, Saxony.
00:17:58.337 --> 00:18:06.005
It's a tangled story where there are so many other vested interests in spinning one version of it rather than the others.
00:18:06.684 --> 00:18:14.271
And at the end of it, you're left with a mess where there's a lot of possibilities and not very much in the way of documented fact.
00:18:14.672 --> 00:18:16.473
So we're lost in the midst of time to some extent.
00:18:16.513 --> 00:18:22.939
But we do have, of course, you know, the Hohner and Seidel both started factories, what, in the 1840s, 1850s.
00:18:22.999 --> 00:18:28.304
So, you know, that is linked to these beginnings in Germany or Austria, I take it.
00:18:28.304 --> 00:19:00.097
yeah and and again the whole thing about the story being uh told with certain other um goals in mind rather than historical documentation as hona became one of the dominant producers and eventually the dominant producer for a very long time they had a massive advertising campaign particularly in america they just spun especially for the american market this story of that really portrayed the harmonica as the all-american instrument despite the fact that you know they were a bit in Germany and producing these things.
00:19:00.417 --> 00:19:20.319
So you have all these ads with Abraham Lincoln played the harmonica, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earpole played, and it's like, well, you know, it's possible, but it's most people's idea of, you know, the history of the harmonica is essentially from the advertising material of one dominant company.
00:19:20.720 --> 00:19:23.041
Not that I'm accusing them of anything terrible.
00:19:23.083 --> 00:19:26.987
They had product to sell and they did an incredible job of selling it.
00:19:27.847 --> 00:20:09.071
Well, they then happens is people put together history of the harmonica which is essentially summarized from a whole bunch of publicity material for the owner company yeah so that really distorted and then people would get commissioned to write the book about the harmonica and of course you've got to put like the first page has got to be the history of the harmonica well it's i've got three weeks to finish this book i can't spend like the next five years researching what actually happened i'll just run with what's available so it becomes um you out of the same story gets more or less repeated and people are used to seeing exactly the same story with very minor variations from lots of different sources and that becomes the accepted version of events.
00:20:09.672 --> 00:21:09.455
We'll move on because we don't have time to cover it all here but people can check out your website and you know read the history but it's interesting to see that you know other contenders you talk about one was British one was German one was American so there's various claims so yeah people can go and check that out but you know it's fascinating stuff but you're moving on in a related thing obviously we've talked about your interest in free reed instruments and the history of the harmonica and this also led you to make a very interesting harmonica collection so on your website again there's pictures of early octave harmonicas a miniature bass harmonica the bomb harmonica and the cheng gong harmonica which is a sort of sliding mouthpiece the hole in a comet which I talked about with Swang recently which is a double reed octave tuned harmonica and various different chord harmonicas all sorts of interesting manifestations and quite interesting because you also talk about MIDI harmonica as well but some of the ideas that we see coming back now you know have been done before haven't they there's been all sorts of crazy you know sort of attempts and experiments isn't there with different sorts of harmonicas through the years
00:21:10.116 --> 00:21:29.237
the vast majority of harmonica patents from both Europe and America look like they never actually got produced and I gather that's probably the same with most areas of intellectual property but some of the things that I've seen the diagrams of them in patent documents.
00:21:29.336 --> 00:21:32.921
It's like, oh, I really, really, really wish they'd made this one.
00:21:33.741 --> 00:21:43.512
It's also possible one in particular was done by a guy from literally just a few miles of the road from where I live now that had multiple sets of reed plates and things.
00:21:43.873 --> 00:21:55.685
I don't think it would be great if that had been made, but then I'm also thinking that would probably have required lungs like Superman to blow that many reeds and the amount of leakage here and there.
00:21:56.086 --> 00:21:57.528
It was probably unplayable.
00:21:57.587 --> 00:21:59.449
I'm guessing that was the reason it was never made.
00:21:59.990 --> 00:22:12.801
Yeah, because it's interesting, you know, talking to some of the customisers on here and Andre a few episodes ago, talking about, you know, obviously they have to sell, right, and they have to become mass popular for them to mass manufacture them, so I guess they make a small number.
00:22:13.362 --> 00:22:21.809
But there's an interesting one, there was a whole new Rhythm and Blues one, and then Tommy Riley was used to, you know, sort of showcase playing it and, you know, to advertise it.
00:22:25.973 --> 00:22:26.493
MUSIC PLAYS
00:22:34.018 --> 00:23:05.827
another interesting section again I covered that in the last podcast with Seth is talking about the early harmonica players and you know going back to that history and we talked about you know Henry Witter and you know the first harmonica recordings and so you've got some really interesting first one here so you've got a collection of 78s and you've got you know recordings that you gathered I understand Roger Trowbridge here in England helped you out with that and you went to the British Library and you did a lot of research and you manage to dig out lots of information.
00:23:05.867 --> 00:23:07.913
You've got all these really early recordings.
00:23:07.972 --> 00:23:10.017
So I'll just pick out some of those.
00:23:10.939 --> 00:23:19.837
But the interesting ones is the first blues harmonic recording we've got is My Dog Gone Lazy Man with Herbert Leonard playing with Clara Smith in 1924.
00:23:19.857 --> 00:23:20.278
Yeah.
00:23:31.041 --> 00:23:36.230
Whereas Pete Hampton did the first recorded harmonica, as I understand, and talked about in the last episode.
00:23:36.250 --> 00:23:38.755
So this is the first blues recording, as you understand it, yeah?
00:23:39.596 --> 00:23:42.642
Blues to a certain definition.
00:23:43.182 --> 00:23:49.212
I went with the standard discography definition, so like Dixon and Godrich and stuff like that.
00:23:49.554 --> 00:23:58.769
Because you could argue, you know, Henry Witter had played stuff in Obviously, African-American influence, second position, blues style.
00:23:59.170 --> 00:24:14.963
So you could argue that was an earlier blues recording, but I've gone with the standard discography type thing of an African-American musician playing on something that they kind of deem a blues rather than, you know, any other style of music.
00:24:15.644 --> 00:24:18.507
And we've just passed the 100th anniversary of that.
00:24:18.886 --> 00:24:19.627
Oh, of course, yeah.
00:24:19.728 --> 00:24:21.890
Yeah, of course, 1924, yeah.
00:24:21.950 --> 00:24:24.432
So you mentioned Henry Witter again that I talked about with the Fox show.
00:24:24.432 --> 00:24:25.432
last time.
00:24:26.153 --> 00:24:33.103
So he recorded the first, as you've got it, the first second position playing on Rain Crow Bill Blues in 1923.
00:24:33.462 --> 00:24:37.307
So, like you said, ahead of 1924, which is the song we've just mentioned.
00:24:50.324 --> 00:24:51.986
Was that quite a well-known song at the time?
00:24:52.673 --> 00:24:55.567
possibly that kind of piece was popular.
00:24:55.607 --> 00:25:30.739
Henry went to himself where he didn't get popular until he did less of the harmonica stuff and more of the early country music stuff and especially when he partnered with fiddle player Grayson then they became quite big and he did the original version of the record the old 97 which was a massive hit so yeah he was kind of big I'm not sure necessarily he made the harmonica that big or that he was big because he played harmonica I think it was his songs that were really the thing.
00:25:30.798 --> 00:25:37.608
But obviously his harmonica playing was good enough to get people to record him when they'd never recorded anything like that kind of harmonica before.
00:25:38.109 --> 00:25:40.232
So a couple more firsts you've pointed out on here.
00:25:40.272 --> 00:25:42.415
So third position, this surprised me.
00:25:42.476 --> 00:25:51.630
So it's partly Little Walter in 1951 playing Lonesome Day with Muddy Waters.
00:25:51.650 --> 00:25:51.869
MUSIC PLAYS
00:25:57.442 --> 00:25:59.983
So yeah, confident that was the first third position recorded.
00:26:00.003 --> 00:26:00.023
A
00:26:00.964 --> 00:26:03.847
lot of these things, you know, get tested over the years.
00:26:03.887 --> 00:26:17.660
This one, I'm pretty sure me and, you know, the late Bob Jack indefinitely, and probably Joe Falesco, I think I can count him on there, would agree that they don't know of one that's earlier than this.
00:26:18.099 --> 00:26:23.805
So it's interesting, you know, if Little Walter came up with that by himself, you know, how did he discover third position?
00:26:23.825 --> 00:26:27.127
I guess, did he just play it and thought, have you any idea about that?
00:26:27.407 --> 00:26:28.509
I wondered
00:26:28.930 --> 00:26:32.012
if it came about after he took up the chromatic.
00:26:32.192 --> 00:26:32.413
Yeah.
00:26:32.953 --> 00:26:34.476
I don't know for sure.
00:26:34.836 --> 00:26:45.748
It kind of makes sense from the mechanics of playing the instrument that if you learn first position that the relative minor position, fourth position, actually is an extension of that.
00:26:46.208 --> 00:26:55.198
And you hear that in a couple of the older recordings that they'll go to a minor section of a major tune, so you go fourth position relatively early on.
00:26:55.458 --> 00:26:55.857
Yeah.
00:26:55.877 --> 00:27:05.131
And the same way between second position a fifth position that, you know, you can find yourself in a minor key just by playing in a major key and doing something different with it.
00:27:05.972 --> 00:27:09.617
Maybe third didn't come about because people really didn't use 12th.
00:27:09.897 --> 00:27:17.229
But it's still kind of surprising that given that, you know, that chord right in the middle of the harp, that somebody didn't go, oh, look, I've got a D minor chord here.
00:27:17.348 --> 00:27:18.770
Yeah.
00:27:18.790 --> 00:27:25.421
Possibly because, you know, and actually to get, like, any of the correct, you know, the...
00:27:26.433 --> 00:27:33.117
music theory minor scales, the stuff that you'd get taught at a music school.
00:27:33.473 --> 00:27:41.480
they're not built in because you've just got this Dorian mode thing where if you want a natural minor, a melodic minor, a harmonic minor, you've got to have bends and overflows.
00:27:42.122 --> 00:27:42.602
Yeah.
00:27:42.622 --> 00:27:48.926
So maybe it's that, but I'm still surprised that people didn't discover you can do all this bluesy stuff in third position.
00:27:50.008 --> 00:27:53.971
Or rather, and I should correct myself, it's entirely possible someone did.
00:27:54.011 --> 00:27:56.074
What happened is they didn't make it to a record.
00:27:56.594 --> 00:28:00.857
I know that Little Walter recorded something that is indisputably third position.
00:28:00.877 --> 00:28:05.903
I haven't been able to find anything else before then, so that's what our definite fact is.
00:28:06.242 --> 00:28:10.847
I'm guessing he was playing third position before then, because he seems confident with it.
00:28:11.509 --> 00:28:18.237
And that came right after he played the chromatic, so that would typically be my guess, or that somebody else did it years ago and we just didn't hear him.
00:28:18.917 --> 00:28:28.228
So talking about the chromatic, you've also got the first chromatic harmonica recording, which is by Borominovic, which is Hayseed Rag with a dizzy trio.
00:28:34.786 --> 00:28:41.176
What sort of year is this one?
00:28:41.798 --> 00:28:56.098
That was just after the 260 chromatic came out again and was billed as being like brand new and it's kind of been around for more than a decade already.
00:28:56.138 --> 00:29:02.211
That was billed by Hohner as being the first record featuring their new chromatic harmonica.
00:29:02.310 --> 00:29:06.719
So again, that's probably a fairly solid one.
00:29:07.279 --> 00:29:19.955
Plus, the chromatic harmonica was relatively new, and the phrase relatively new gets an asterisk after it because things have changed in the last five years on the whole history of that as well.
00:29:20.557 --> 00:29:26.862
So another really interesting section, I think something you're really well known for, I don't know how innovative you were, is about tunings.
00:29:27.082 --> 00:29:30.865
You've got lots of information about tunings, different harmonica tunings on your website.
00:29:30.925 --> 00:29:34.308
So were you one of the first who sort of really seriously got into it?
00:29:34.328 --> 00:29:38.632
I think you were definitely one of the major resources about it the time?
00:29:39.393 --> 00:29:43.657
Well, that was essentially how the website came about.
00:29:44.218 --> 00:29:48.403
I never planned on it being whatever it is today.
00:29:48.423 --> 00:29:55.951
But 1997 or 98, I got the internet.
00:29:56.511 --> 00:30:00.596
And at that point, I was pretty much working full time on harmonica repair.
00:30:00.675 --> 00:30:06.461
And I hesitate to say a custom work, but, you know, modifications to people's requirements, I guess.
00:30:07.083 --> 00:30:16.553
So I was making contact details available to people from all over the world who weren't necessarily, you know, in the loop on who was fixing things.
00:30:16.613 --> 00:30:20.576
And there really weren't very many of us working on harmonicas in the 90s.
00:30:21.117 --> 00:30:23.259
Obviously, I needed people to be able to find me.
00:30:23.299 --> 00:30:34.612
So I put something up that back in the days of a relatively small internet, you could go to, it wasn't Google, but whatever people use, they'd go harmonica repair and you might be able to find me and email me.
00:30:35.532 --> 00:31:11.240
And then there were all the different tuning options I could offer that you know at that point there wasn't a lot of discussion readily available online about it there were some things if you were if you got Harmonica World magazine you know you might see an article on it if you saw the spa magazine you might have had stuff on it or you might have vaguely heard people talking about the difference between how they used to be tuned and how they're tuned now but it was all very esoteric so I thought when I'm dealing with customers especially by email not even by phone for a lot of cases how would you want to set up?
00:31:11.361 --> 00:31:12.521
Well, how can you set it up?
00:31:12.582 --> 00:31:14.443
Well, I can set it up like this, that or this.
00:31:15.065 --> 00:31:15.826
What's the difference?
00:31:16.405 --> 00:31:23.953
Well, you know, and usually if people told me they played in a certain style, I could recommend how they would want their instrument.
00:31:24.034 --> 00:31:28.759
And again, not just the tuning, but like the reel adjustment and things like that.
