Harmonica

Another key torchbearer was Charlie Musselwhite, another deeply respected blues harp player who bridged the old Chicago world and the new rock audience and is still playing beautifully to this day.

And there's a fancier cousin of the blues harp worth a quick mention, the chromatic harmonica, the bigger one with a button on the side that lets you play every note sharp and flat.

A few blues masters like George Harmonica Smith and Little Walter himself on certain tracks use the chromatic to get a deeper, more sax-like, moody sound, especially on slow blues.

It's a different animal from the little diatonic blues harp, but it's part of the family, and that thick, dark, chromatic tone shows up on some gorgeous slow blues records, and later you get harmonica heroes right in the rock world, Magic Dick of the Jay Giles Band with his showpiece Whammer Jammer.

a full-on harmonica feature that rocked arenas and in more recent decades john popper of blues traveler playing harmonica with this blazing machine gun virtuosity hundreds of notes flying by that made a whole new generation of kids pick up the harp so the little instrument never left from a mail order catalog to muddy waters band to the Rolling Stones, to a stadium.

I was like, oh, I kind of recognize.

Like, don't they mention Harmonica once in this game, too?

Harmonia is like the big, big, big bad guy.

OK,

Yeah.

Real quick about Harmonica.

We don't get a lot of Harmonica on AGT.

You got to go back.

Was it season one or two? We had the Millers.

Yeah.

The brothers, they had the Harmonica

player.

And somehow conveniently, Black people were thrown out of that and it's forgotten.

And all they know about us is us, Aunt Kizzy and Harmonica playing and Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.

That's just a piece.

We were a lot more to the world than that.

I'll save it.

You sound like Harmonica.

Just remind me.

We went to MacGyver on the weekend.

It was probably, what, 400 or 500 people there, maybe? That was a fucking lot of people, man.

A lot of people.

And he, for a couple of songs, busts out the old fucking Harmonica thing.

Slinger thing And he fucking On the thing Yeah yeah He's fucking doing Doing the thing As he's singing Yeah He's a fucking Performer too He's a great performer Like not just Fucking sing But he's He's getting around On the stage And fucking Yeah Yeah he's good The guy can name men But I don't think you'll ever be able To see that bloke again For 35 bucks It was Yeah Yeah

The Yankees were floundering, and then they finished really strong, but while they were floundering, they'd already decided that they were gonna fire Yogi Berra, and they were gonna hire Johnny Keane.

Well, the team finished, what, something like thirty-two and thirteen down the stretch after the Phil Lyns/Harmonica incident.

And Yogi took them to game seven of the World Series against Johnny Keane's Cardinals.

And because they'd already made the decision that he was gone, and I guess had a surreptitious agreement with Johnny Keane, Yogi Berra was gone.

I've, I found my harmonica, and I haven't played my harmonica on the show for, for quite some time.

Uh, well, not, not least because it's not a har-harmonica podcast.

This, this isn't, uh, Harmonica Cast.

But I don't think that precludes me from occasionally playing the harmonica for your entertainment, so here goes.

Here's, here's a, a brief, uh, harmonica tune that I'm going to make up as I go along, and this will set, uh, show 62 off to a flying start.

You're thinking, "Neil, you're one minute and nine seconds into the show, and, uh, you, you've basically done nothing yet.

You've achieved nothing.

Uh, you've played the harmonica, but as you've admitted yourself, this isn't Harmonica Cast, so, so that's not getting you anywhere.