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 ...

Phillips released two singles from Cotton, “Straighten Up Baby” in 1953 and “Cotton Crop Blues” the following year. Cotton was still a teenager working as a regular on the Memphis music scene when ...

Most nights, you can walk into a blues club and find a harmonica player blowing their heart out onstage. The wailing, honking sound associated with Western movies and juke joints is what many harp ...

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 ...

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 ...

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Back in 1991, East Bay bluesman Mark Hummel called on some of his fellow local harmonicats to help him put on a show at Ashkenaz in Berkeley. It wasn’t anything fancy — just a killer showcase for the ...

The blues world was changed forever on a sunny day around 1960 when a little boy walked into a five-and-dime in Los Angeles. “I was 8, maybe 9 when I saw it, all shiny in a display case,” says Billy ...

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Fifty cents and a cereal box top. That, and whatever a stamp cost in 1949, sparked one of the most remarkable instrumental careers in music history, one that landed Charlie McCoy in the Country Music ...