Blues Harmonica For Dummies

Winslow Yerxa

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119748922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Breathe the blues into your harmonica!

Blues harmonica is the most popular and influential style of harmonica playing, and it forms the basis for playing harmonica in other styles such as rock and country. Blues Harmonica for Dummies gives you a wealth of content devoted to the blues approach—specific techniques and applications, including bending and making your notes sound richer and fuller with tongue-blocked enhancements; use of amplification to develop a blues sound; blues licks and riffs; constructing a blues harmonica solo; accompanying singers; historical development of blues styles; and important blues players and recordings.

The accompanying website features all the musical examples from the book, plus play-along exercises and songs that let you hear the sound you're striving for.

• In-depth coverage of major blues harmonica techniques
• Blues song forms, improvisation, and accompanying singers
• Information on blues history and personalities

If you're intrigued by the idea of understanding and mastering the compelling (yet mysterious) art of playing blues on the harmonica, Blues Harmonica For Dummies has you covered.

P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you're probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Blues Harmonica For Dummies (9781118252697). The book you see here shouldn't be considered a new or updated product. But if you're in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We're always writing about new topics!

Part 1

So You Wanna Play Blues Harmonica?

IN THIS PART …

You discover the strong bond between blues and the harmonica, find out which harmonicas to get and how to care for them, pick up on some essential musician’s lingo, and then get started with the basics of playing blues on the harmonica.

Chapter 1

Connecting with the Blues

IN THIS CHAPTER

Expressing yourself through the blues

Understanding how the harmonica fits into the blues

Getting started playing blues harmonica

The blues is a uniquely American art form that got its start from the collision of African and European cultures in the American South. First documented around the beginning of the 20th century, blues has continued to expand in popularity ever since. Blues began with its original base of African Americans in the rural South and then migrated — first to regional population centers, then to the industrial North, then to the West Coast, and finally to Great Britain and Europe during the 1960s.

At the same time, as African Americans moved on to newer musical styles, middle-class Caucasian Americans took up the blues, both as listeners and players, making the blues a truly integrated style. But even before this passing of the cultural torch, blues exerted a profound influence on other American music styles, including jazz, country, and rock. And blues isn’t done extending its reach. I’ve heard musicians from Brazil creating new flavors of the blues by infusing it with their own traditions. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fur-clad Inuit in an igloo somewhere in the Canadian Arctic is whiling away the long winter nights by singing the blues in the Inuktitut language by the light of a whale oil lantern.

The harmonica has been an integral part of the blues odyssey from the beginning. During the golden age of Chicago blues, pianist Otis Spann once remarked, “Harmonica is the mother of the band.” (See Chapters 18 and 21 for more on the history and great players of blues harmonica.) Spann’s piano playing was beautiful, but that statement has also been sweet music to the ears of harmonica players ever since.

What the Blues Is All About

Blues seems to defy the standards of how notes fit together — a legacy of that cultural collision of African and European musical ideas. Wherever a clear, straight path leads to certainty about how the elements of music combine in a systematic way, blues finds a way around it or simply veers off on a tangent. If you try to relate the blues to that straight path, you can do it, but you have to come up with some sophisticated theories to make it all fit together. Jazz musicians do that, and they do it in a convincing way.

When they feel the need to do so, blues musicians can also come up with sophisticated explanations of how the blues works. But they seldom focus on such explanations because, ultimately, blues is about expressing yourself in a direct (though often sly and humorous) way by using the expressive tools of the blues. Who cares how your cellphone works? You can use it to communicate, and the same goes for the blues.

In Chapter 3 I discuss the basics of how notes fit together, and in Chapter 7 I relate some of the classic methods that blues harmonica players use to adapt the harmonica’s notes to the musical forms used in the blues.

Blues is about natural expression

Blues musicians often adapt their song lyrics to the immediate circumstance, commenting on current events or to people in the room by name. At the same time, blues is full of clichés. By having the clichés to fall back on, blues singers can feel free to add or change those clichés in a way that feels comfortable. They don’t have to stick to the program, but at the same time, they don’t have to come up with something totally original and new. They can change a few words or notes or phrase the rhythm differently and thereby express themselves more vitally in that moment than if they had to perform something locked down on a page. Audience members familiar with the clichés that blues singers draw on appreciate the singers’ skills in using the materials.

Playing blues harmonica also uses many clichés that you can alter at will. Short sequences of notes called licks are like little sayings that you can drop into a conversation wherever they seem to fit. Blues harmonica players often string together clichés that they may have heard and played many times, but they string them together in a new sequence, maybe change some notes, or alter the rhythm to make it fresh, just as singers do.

Blues gives you a safe kind of musical freedom

Like any art form, blues requires you to hone your craft in order to perform it well. But blues also offers you a lot of flexibility to express yourself without worrying whether you’ll fall off the tightrope or commit some terrible faux pas. If you’re a beginner, you can get started without fearing that glowering critics will be staring down their noses at you for transgressing some esoteric rule known only to the high mavens of the art. Consider some of the no-fault aspects of the blues:

• Playing a wrong note in the blues actually takes a lot of effort and planning. Notes that shouldn’t fit according to traditional rules of music theory and harmony somehow always seem to work in the blues. I cover a little bit of music theory in Chapter 3.
• The simplicity of the blues verse makes losing your way kind of hard because you can always tell where you are. Each blues verse is short, consisting of three segments that each begin with a different background chord. You’ll learn to identify those chords as you listen and play. You can even repeat the same melody fragment over all three segments of the verse if you want to. I cover this topic in Chapter 7 and extend it in Chapter 17.
• Repetition is a big part of blues, and so is playing short sequences of as few as three notes — as long as you do so rhythmically. This book is full of these short segments, called licks and riffs. I go into detail on blues harmonica licks and riffs in Chapters 6, 13, 14, 15, and 18.

Why the Harmonica Is Cool All on Its Own

The harmonica has been a part of the blues pretty much since the beginning. One reason for this is that the harmonica has always been inexpensive; another is that, no matter where you lived, you could buy harmonicas by mail order. But price and availability aren’t the only reasons the harmonica is attractive. The harmonica has a natural genius for the blues, which is remarkable when you consider that the people in Germany who designed the harmonica in the early 19th century were interested in playing cheerful, sprightly, German folk melodies. They never envisioned the moaning, wailing sounds that people now associate with the harmonica. (For more on blues harmonica history, have a look at Chapter 21.)

The sound of the blues, built right in

Two things about the blues immediately strike the ear of anyone whose main musical experience has been with the piano’s precise sound and European music’s do-re-mi scale:

• Some of the notes sound flat compared to the do-re-mi scale. If a blues singer sang a song like “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, the first thing you’d notice is that some of the notes sound different because they’re sung at a lower pitch. The lowered notes are called blue no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: So You Wanna Play Blues Harmonica?
• Part 2: Doin’ the Crawl: Your First Harmonica Moves
• Part 3: Beyond the Basics: Getting Bluesy
• Part 4: Developing Your Style
• Part 5: Taking It to the Streets: Sharing Your Music
• Part 6: The Part of Tens
• Part 7: Appendixes
• Index
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement