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 ...

Phil Wiggins, a blues harmonica virtuoso who embraced the jaunty Piedmont style and toured the world as part of a duo celebrating a distinctive musical form that was revived in clubs and impromptu ...

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Bruce Willis, pictured in October 2019, brought fans joy by playing the blues on harmonica. (Charles Sykes / Invision/Associated ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mark Hummel didn’t set out to be an impresario. He had no burning ambition to corner the market on the world’s greatest blues harmonica players. But after getting a bracing shot of energy from ...

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 ...

One of the most versatile harmonica players in pop history is Stevie Wonder, shown here in Paris in 1963 at age 13. Charley Ley / Mirrorpix Many harmonica histories begin around 1100 B.C. with the ...

Mississippi blues harp player James Cotton was certainly considered lucky for the break he got joining Muddy Waters’ band in the late 1950s, taking over a spot previously held by such venerated ...

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 ...