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 ...

UPDATE: Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blowout tour, which was supposed to launch in January, has been postponed. New dates have not been announced yet. See markhummel.com for more information. The ...

Brody Buster performs as a one-man band before a Royals game at Kauffman Stadium in June. It's been twenty years since Brody Buster's first round of glory days — when he was a 10-year-old blues ...

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in ...

Between his huge frame and the immense sounds he coaxed out of his harmonica, West Coast blues harmonica virtuoso William Clarke was a giant of the blues. A full-time blues musician since quitting his ...

In 1944, at just 9 years old James Cotton was an orphan on the Bonnie Blue plantation in Tunica, Miss. The young boy had learned to play the harmonica, first from his mother who had made train whistle ...

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 ...

Frank “Iron Jaw” Oakley, L.C. Gant, and Dawayne Gilley at the Grand Emporium LaBudde Special Collections One night in 1965 inside an old club at 12th and Vine, Frank “Iron Jaw” Oakley asked Kansas ...

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 ...

Tony Glover, a harmonica player who as a member of the group Koerner, Ray and Glover was at the center of the folk music revival of the 1960s and helped introduce a new audience to the blues, died on ...

You can be sure that folks on the historic downtown hotel’s patio were standing throughout the concert. Hummel expects the same when he and Funderburgh return for the 12th annual KXCI House Rockin’ ...