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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the summer of 1963, a strange record by a 12-year-old boy who’d already racked up a string of flops spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It’s largely a showcase for that ...

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 ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... It’s as if, his mother says, “some old bluesman got ahold of him and took him away.” That would explain everything — the school problems, the lawyers, court ...

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’ ...

The first song played in space was performed on a musical instrument that weighed just half an ounce and could only make seven notes. In December 1965, while NASA's Gemini 6 was speeding through an ...