Among the harmonica’s many wonderful and unique traits, there is this: You have to really suck to be good at it. As one of America’s finest and busiest harmonica players, Denver’s Ronnie Shellist ...

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 ...

Getting his start as a member of the legendary Muddy Waters’ band, Little Walter Jacobs took the harmonica to a whole new level. Developing his own unique techniques, blues musicians still look to him ...

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 ...

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 ...