Harmonica Magic: Virtuoso Display in American Folk Music

Abstract

mouth organ) is probably the most widely played instrument in the history of the United States. The small free-reed instrument, invented in the 1820s, has been known in America since at least 1830 (Bourne 1830), and recent estimates put the total number of living U.S. players at some 40 million (Gaskill 1967). Despite these facts, scholarly discussion of this instrument and its repertoire has been virtually nonexistent. Because of its low price-a nickel at the turn of the century, fifty cents before World War Two, $2.50 thereafter, and still under ten dollars today (Bascom 1909:239; Glover 1965:10)-the harmonica was often a child's first, and often only, musical instrument, often found in Christmas stockings or given as a birthday gift. This toy-like association with the innocence of childhood often made it acceptable in environments and communities where other instruments were forbidden for religious reasons (Peterson and Di Maggio 1973:46; Wolfe 1977:60). Its price made it available to the black and white poor as well. Though this association with marginal states and people has trivialized the harmonica in the eyes of the academic music establishment, it obviously is a basic element in U.S. folk music, and of particular concern to students of country music and the blues. When the first hillbilly and race records appeared in the 1920s, they included performances of a distinctive series of harmonica solos, apparently well known in Afro-American tradition as early as the 1870s, with Old World analogues in English popular culture, Irish musical, and African narrative traditions. Descriptions of unconventional harmonica playing techniques occur as early as 1917. This paper explores the interplay between Anglo- and Afro-American folk traditions and the popular novelty entertainment of the past fifty years as seen in this type of harmonica playing. I will argue that these techniques and compositions were important as the acid tests of instrumental ability as measured against the amateur harmonica playing of the period. Concepts of virtuosity, methods of representation, social dynamics of performance contexts and the rela