• Instructional Materials - the ultimate review page (Mini-reviews of my five favourite instructional materials in each style!)
• Advice for buying your very first harmonica(s).
• Books (not instructional books, but rather books that happen to mention harmonica in the story)
• Popular Songs that feature harmonica (Over 100 songs featuring harmonica that made the Top 40! A great resource for cover bands that have a harmonica player!)
• Movies/TV (that feature harmonica)
• NEW - 3 new reviews! Original reviews of Music CDs (featuring harmonica)
• Miscellaneous Harmonica Trivia (harmonica in space, celebrities who also play harmonica, etc etc)
• Research on Harmonica (information on those involved in science of harmonica playing and building)
• Australian Harmonica Players (current)
• Australian Harmonica Events (Frenzy etc)
• Internet forums (Harp-L, HarpTalk, alt.music.harmonica)
• Pictures of Harmonica Curiosities (signed harmonicas, weird harmonicas, harmonica figurines etc etc)
• Harmonica Tuning and Customisation (just my limited experiences)

I have intentionally tried to create a harmonica webpage that does not duplicate the other great pages out there. Topics like "How to play harmonica" are already covered by other pages. Start at www.harmonica.org or a search engine to find those pages. Or see my under construction page of links

Last updated: November 2000 (see the updates here).

Here are some reviews I have written about music CDs featuring harmonica.

• NEW Carlos Del Junco's Big Boy
• NEW Janet Seidel and William Galison's Love Letters
• NEW Collard Greens and Gravy's self-titled Collard Greens and Gravy
• Tommy Reilly's re-release of Harmonica Parisien
• Larry Adler's CD The Genius of Larry Adler
• Brendan Power's New Irish Harmonica
• Charlie Musselwhite's Continental Drifter

 Miscellaneous Harmonica Trivia

If you can help me expand this list please email me.

• Stevie Wonder recorded a 1968 album (when he was 18 years old) where he played all the instruments including harmonica. However, he released it under the pseudonym "Eiverts Rednow" which is Stevie Wonder spelt backwards.
• Rod Stewart's first recording gig was playing harmonica on Little Milly's hit "My boy lollypop".
• Harmonica was the first musical instrument in space when Wally Schirra took a Hohner Little Lady on Gemini 6 and played "Jingle Bells" two weeks before Christmas, 1965. The other astronaut on Gemini 6 was Thomas Stafford and he accompanied Wally on a bell tamborine (so technically harmonica AND tamborine share the honour of being the first instrument in space!).
• The Credence Clear Water Revival song "Down on the corner" features harmonica in the lyrics of the first verse...

• I reckon the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee" is referring to a harmonica in this lyric...

• According to a 1947 Ripley's "Believe it or not"... "Alan [Blackie] Shackner, harmonica virtuoso, can play the famous violin sonata 'Hora Stoccato' - a total of 1096 notes in 90 seconds." [Incidentally, Blackie - born 1917 - has embraced new technology and occasionally adds his words of wisdom to the internet forum Harp-L. I hope I'm still as sharp as him when I'm in my eighties!!!]
• Lee J Cobb was New York Harmonica Champion in the mid 1920s before going on to become famous for originating the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and the movies On The Waterfront, Exodus, How The West Was Won, In Like Flint, Our Man Flint, and The Exorcist.
• When Junior Wells was buried, his friends put a set of harmonicas in all 12 keys inside the coffin for him to play in the "next life". I guess they were worried that they would only have those stringed harps in heaven!
• Harmonica Player Ronald Chesney gave private harmonica lessons to Prince Charles and Princess Anne at Windsor Castle. According to Ray Grieves book 'A Band in a Waistcoat Pocket, "Prince Charles was said to have shown considerable proficiency on a tiny eight note (probably a Hohner Little Lady?) at his birthday party in 1956, the Queen remarked that she would have to tie a piece of string to the harmonica to prevent him from swallowing it - a common concern among players of the little instrument."
• Rumour has it that John Lennon of the Beatles stole his first harmonica.
• Jim Scancarelli the cartoonist occasionally features harmonica in his Gasoline Alley cartoon strip. In May 1997 he did a daily series that featured the real life character Pete Pedersen in his cartoon! Other cartoons by Jim that have featured harmonica include one where a man in a car stuck in a city traffic jam is dreaming of playing harmonica in the wide-open spaces on a cattle-drive. Also his Christmas cartoon featured some angels who were playing harmonica "harps" rather than the traditional stringed harps! Click here for the Pete Pedersen series. Click here for the Xmas cartoon featuring the angels playing harmonicas. Or you can read his other cartoon here.
• NEW Bunny Hoest the cartoonist mentioned harmonica on one of her Lockhorns cartoons. See it here. Or see more information about her other cartoons here.
• Ella Fitzgerald often played harmonica during her stage shows. An Australian musician called Mark Trapnell recorded a song that sampled Ella telling the story of her uncle teacher her harmonica. See the text of that talk click here (under construction).
• The Chipmonks did an album featuring harmonica. See their album cover here.
• David Fahley did a cartoon featuring harmonica as part of his Doctor Fun series. See it here. Also check out David's website by following the link listed with the cartoon.
• NEW John B Sebastian Jr famous for his singing, song writing, and guitar and harmonica with the band Lovin' Spoonful (most memorably on the song "What a day for a day dream"?) was the son of the famous classical harmonica player John Sebastian (born as John Sebastian Puglise). Anyway, when The Doors were recording Roadhouse Blues for the Morrison Hotel album they thought it needed some blues harmonica. Jim Morrison and the guitarist played a bit of harmonica but they decided to get in John Sebastian Jr to do the job. John did it but didn't want him or presumably his father's image to be associated with the wild irreverent image of Jim Morrison so his harmonica playing was credited on The Doors album as by the fictional G. Puglise. Puglise being his father's real surname and the initial G for "Giovanni" - Italian for John.
• NEW John B Sebastian Jr (see above) also wrote a children's book called "JB's Harmonica" which seems to be semi-autobiographical. The book is about a family of bears. The father is a famous harmonica player and the son plays as well. However, the son gets annoyed on everyone comparing him to his father and temporarily gives up the harmonica to find his identity. In the end he follows his father's choice of instrument but takes it in a different direction playing music in his own unique way. A good story that should interest harmonica playing parents reading to kids or fans of John Sebastian wanting to collect everything he does!

• Rick Epping is a very accessible guru who works for Hohner USA. He regularly writes very informative articles about his experiments with harmonica manufacture for Hohner USA's Easy Reeding magazine and he often sends posts to Harp-L.
• Howard Levy pushed diatonic technique by overblowing and overdrawing to use a diatonic harmonica chromatically. Harmonica Information Press No.4 has the best article I've read about this topic.
• Turbo Dog (or rather Dr Turbo Dog also known as James Antaki) and Hank Bahnson have published thorough work on harmonica physics particularly overblows. There is some very interesting information on their inventions at the USA Patents Office website. And they published a thorough paper called "Acoustical and physical dynamics of the diatonic harmonica", by Henry Bahnson and James Antaki, 1998 Acoustical Society of America, vol 103 (4), April 1998, p2134-2144.
• Robert B. Johnson (an Australian!!) published a thorough paper on "Pitch Control in Harmonica Playing" in the journal Acoustics Australia Vol 15(3), 69-75.
• Vern from Harp-L also does some very interesting research that is worth searching the Harp-L archives for. I like this guy's approach to research.

If you can help me expand this list please email me.

• Ian Collard - from Collard, Greens and Gravy has an self-titled album out. See his website to hear some examples! Ian is well known for his harp playing on the Sunscreen Song that was a Number 1 hit in Australia, UK and USA. Read some interesting info about the Suncreen song a here.
• Christian Marsh - Planet Bound (jazzy with New Age feel - one of my favourite instrumental harmonica albums)
• Backsliders (Jim Conway on harp) - blues, also feature on the Sea Change soundtrack
• Chris Wilson - blues/rock (some songs don't feature harp)
• Bob Howe - an Aussie session harmonica player - country, blues, and more.
• Paul Kelly (Dylanesque rack player - some songs don't feature harp)
• Greedy Smith (from Mental as Anything - he did a solo album called "Love Harmonica")
• Steve Williams (with John Farnham - best known song with harp is "Chain Reaction")
• Dylan from the ABC TV show "Recovery" sometimes plays harp on his show.
• Jack Thompson - the actor - can play a passable blues harp.
• Bondi Cigars (some songs and even some live performances don't feature harp), also feature on Sea Change soundtrack
• Peter Harper (harmonica on Liam Bradley's Soundtrack to the ABC TV series "A river somewhere". 7 of 21 tracks on the CD have harmonica).
• Gary McDonald (famous for his character Normal Gunston) plays some pretty good jazz harmonica. The audience asked for an encore of his blues harp when he performed on stage with Frank Zappa's band "The Mothers of Invention".
• Justin "Juzzie" Smith. A young Australian harmonica player. He also plays a great slide guitar.

• The Sydney Harmonica Festival - Run by Doug Lyons this was by all accounts a great event. Check out the link to his website for updates!
• Harmonica Frenzy - a [hopefully!?!?!] annual event held in Australia's capital of live music, Melbourne. Run by Vittorio and Phil from Harp-L it features two days of performances, jams and high quality seminars on every aspect of harmonica. It was extremely reasonably priced. Do not miss this event! The last one was on 9 and 10 April 1999. I haven't heard any news about the next one yet!
• Woodstock Harmonica Association - [absolutely no relation to the Woodstock concerts in the 1960s!] a Sydney group that has met every three months for more than 4 years now. Run by John it features beginner's talks and a "put your name down on the list" concert where everyone is welcome. Features a huge variety of styles from blues, folk, classical, comical and even has a regular Harmonicats-style trio. The meetings are non-intimidating as the organisers and the performers are all amateurs. There is a nominal charge for entry. Lately, they've been having professional harmonica seminars (additional $A15 charge) by experts who ran workshops at the Frenzy (see above)... so consider Woodstock if you can't make the annual FRENZY!

• My favourite internet forum for harmonica information is Harp-L. Start at www.harmonica.org and follow the links..... Harp-L gets a lot of messages.
• Slidemeister is a new chromatic forum that has much more specific chromatic (and therefore fewer messages). It is part of http://www.egroups.com
• There is a newsgroup called alt.music.harmonica. You can also read the newsgroup messages with a web browser click here.
• Also HarpTalk internet forum. Seems to be less technical that Harp-L but still interesting. You can read the messages with a web browser click here (get subscribe instructions from there).
• Also check out the Harmonica Players Webring. The harmonica players webring is a great idea but I find it difficult to set-up (certainly that is my fault). In the meantime this link will list the webring sites for you.

Here is my "beginner's" account of tuning a harmonica to natural minor and Melody Maker ™ tuning. Since then I've fixed up and modified other harmonica tunings. I fixed about ten Lee Oskars that had gone out of tune by overuse (I expect they will loose tuning quicker than a new harp but it beats throwing them away). Also I've done some tuning on more expensive harps. But watch out for Huang harps the reeds are very flimsy relative to Hohner and Lee Oskar and the same amount of force can cause damage.

Also I was fortunate to play a chromatic harmonica customised by Harp-L list member Paul Farmer.

Here is a copy of the post I send to Harp-L about his harmonica. If you want to learn about customisation you should search for "Paul Farmer" in the archives or Harp-L or Slidemeister because his posts are very informative.

smckenzie@ozemail.com.au