April 5, 2023

Annie Raines interview

Annie Raines interview

Annie Raines joins me on episode 83. Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player. Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly attending a jam there in her youth, and meeting many great players and joining the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. Annie then teamed-up with her long time musical partner, Paul Rishell, after also meeting him around the Boston area. They have now been performing and ...

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Season 1 Diatonic Harmonica Blues Harmonica Female Harmonica Player

Annie Raines joins me on episode 83.

Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player. Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly attending a jam there in her youth, and meeting many great players and joining the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. 

Annie then teamed-up with her long time musical partner, Paul Rishell, after also meeting him around the Boston area. They have now been performing and recording together for over 30 years, releasing seven albums, and winning a WC Handy award for one of them. Annie has also guested on albums with several other artists, including Pinetop Perkins.

Annie teaches harmonica and has released an instructional video, and gives workshops at various harmonica gatherings.

Links:

Annie and Paul's website:
https://www.paulandannie.com/

John Gindick’s website:
https://gindick.com/harmonica/

Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ReDMrEdmbA

George Mayweather: What I'd Say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wp-pAk4epI

Blues Harmonica Blueprint instruction:
https://truefire.com/techniques-guitar-lessons/blues-harmonica-blueprint/blues-harmonica-blueprint-introduction/v5544

Tomlin Harmonica School:
https://www.tomlinharmonicaschool.com/


Videos:

Annie singing You’ve Been A Good Old Wagon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKgydSYSC7k

Charles Leighton playing In A Sentimental Mood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsPhW6UXE00

Canned Heat Blues: from Live In Woodstock DVD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux-lQaoZewk

Harmonica UK Virtual Festival 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD4PzISV2FQ

Augusta Blues / Swing week 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXpwCMrs5c

Duet with John Sebastien:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmPOnRUDZAE



Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS

Support the show

01:34 - Annie is from the Boston area of the US

01:45 - What first drew Annie into music

02:10 - Started playing some piano when seven years old, but was a bad student

03:08 - Picked up music again in high school, playing a keyboard synthesiser

03:21 - Did some singing in the synagogue, but didn’t know what she was singing in Hebrew

03:41 - Started playing harmonica age 17, after looking for a book on how to juggle

04:06 - Learnt to play harmonica from a John Gindick instructional book

04:16 - Juggling and playing harmonica, and Juzzie Smith

04:44 - Studied the John Gindick book in some detail

04:44 - Studied the John Gindick book in some detail

06:33 - Was given a tape of blues players from a younger student at school and Annie felt an affinity to the music of Muddy Waters

08:34 - Started attending a blues jam in Cambridge, Massachusetts

10:45 - Annie got up to take part in her first blues jam about three months after first going to the club

11:54 - Joined the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra

13:25 - Learnt how to breathe through the harmonica in the orchestra

14:29 - Some of the other well known members of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra

14:48 - Annie met George Mayweather, who became a mentor for Annie

16:05 - Annie took lessons from five different people from the Cambridge area, including Jerry Portnoy

17:17 - First harmonica was a Pocket Pal which came with John Gindick book

17:23 - Still tinkered on the piano but couldn’t improvise on that

18:09 - Later developed singing and learnt to play mandolin

18:35 - Dropped out of college to focus on music

18:54 - Started teaching harmonica age 19 and received ten tapes of the harmonica greats

19:58 - Slim Harpo was also an inspiration

21:52 - How parents reacted to Annie dropping out of college to pursue music

22:47 - Income from music wasn’t great in the early days

23:16 - Had a tweed amp that had to carry on the bus

24:16 - Paying gigs started a few years later playing with Shirley Lewis, and Annie could quit the day job

24:54 - Practise regime followed

25:36 - Did some work tuning harmonicas for Magic Dick’s harmonica venture

26:02 - Teamed-up with Paul Rishell for the first time in 1992

27:11 - Paul Rishell played harmonica friendly songs

28:08 - Thought country blues was easy to play before experiencing it with Paul Rishell

29:14 - Got gigs with Paul Rishell and started touring with him and playing a regular gig

31:18 - First album recorded with Paul Rishell was I Want You To Know in 1996

32:16 - Moving To The Country album was released in 2000, winning a WC Handy Award for Best Acoustic Blues album

32:40 - Annie played three songs on Paul Rishell’s Swear To Tell The Truth album, before their partnership was established

33:16 - Paul’s wife became seriously ill but still encouraged them to get out playing as they were starting to make a name for themselves

34:00 - Goin’ Home album from 2004 and Annie’s singing

35:53 - Harmonica is such a good instrument for giving a voice to a voiceless person

37:00 - Chromatic harmonica

37:58 - Heard Charles Leighton at the SPAH convention, who is a great chromatic player

39:04 - A Night In Woodstock album with Paul Rishell also released as a DVD

39:21 - A Night In Woodstock was released as album sales were dropping, so Annie and Paul set-up their own record company

40:01 - Annie and Paul appear in a documentary called ‘Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost’

41:11 - Guesting on other musicians albums, including Pinetop Perkins

42:24 - Also recorded with John Sebastien

43:05 - Played with Susan Tedeschi, with whom Annie was the first woman to play on the House of Blues stage in Boston

44:01 - Being a female blues harmonica player

45:47 - Released Blues Harmonica Blueprint instructional material

46:41 - Has given harmonica workshops in various locations and lots of teaching of harmonica

47:54 - 10 minute question

49:14 - Harmonica of choice is the traditional Hohner Marine Band

50:11 - Hohner Super 64 is chromatic of choice

50:38 - Created lot of different tunings when working on Magic Dick company harps, but generally doesn’t perform with different tunings

51:42 - Overblows: doesn’t use them on a gig

52:11 - Doesn’t do much maintenance work on own harmonicas

52:41 - Is a Hohner endorsee

53:12 - Embouchre: 70% tongue blocks, 30% pucker

54:07 - Uses a small Vibro Champ amp mostly now as playing with Paul Rishell in a duo most of the time

54:41 - Fender Deluxe Reverb is choice when need a large amp

54:46 - Mic-up small amp when needed

55:05 - Acoustic microphones: typically SM58 or a beta SM57

56:30 - Amped microphones: Astatic 200 crystal mic

57:01 - Effects: Boss RV3 (reverb pedal with delay), and a tape Echoplex

57:29 - Future plans

WEBVTT

00:00:01.153 --> 00:00:03.076
Annie Rains joins me on episode 83.

00:00:03.396 --> 00:00:07.482
Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player.

00:00:08.464 --> 00:00:22.463
Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly attending a jam there in her youth, and meeting many great players and joining the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra.

00:00:22.503 --> 00:00:30.489
Annie then teamed up with her long-time musical partner, Paul Rochelle, after also meeting him around the Boston area.

00:00:31.071 --> 00:00:39.182
They have now been performing and recording together for over 30 years, releasing seven albums and winning a WC Handy Award for one of them.

00:00:40.564 --> 00:00:45.432
Annie has also guested on albums with several other artists, including Pinetop Perkins.

00:00:46.533 --> 00:00:52.402
Annie teaches harmonica and has released an instructional video and gives workshops at various harmonica gatherings.

00:00:54.125 --> 00:01:06.338
This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonicas, visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas.

00:01:25.665 --> 00:01:27.451
Hello, Annie Rains, and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:28.135 --> 00:01:28.536
Hi, Neil.

00:01:28.575 --> 00:01:29.037
How are you?

00:01:30.102 --> 00:01:30.885
I'm good, thank you.

00:01:30.924 --> 00:01:32.290
Thanks for joining today.

00:01:32.329 --> 00:01:33.352
Great to speak to you.

00:01:33.393 --> 00:01:36.685
So you're a native of Boston in the U.S.?

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.000
?

00:01:37.569 --> 00:01:38.230
That's correct.

00:01:38.471 --> 00:01:39.671
I grew up around Boston.

00:01:39.691 --> 00:01:44.775
I grew up in a few different towns around Boston, not in Boston proper.

00:01:45.177 --> 00:01:46.677
What was your upbringing like with music?

00:01:47.237 --> 00:01:48.760
What got you into music in the first place?

00:01:49.540 --> 00:01:52.582
My family were musical, but I guess what you call carriers.

00:01:52.643 --> 00:01:55.245
They didn't play instruments actively.

00:01:55.945 --> 00:02:03.031
My mother could carry a tune and my father could remember the lyrics to every song from the 1930s that he ever heard.

00:02:03.072 --> 00:02:06.415
They listened to opera and classical music around the house.

00:02:06.555 --> 00:02:25.985
They even had some jazz and blues albums that I wasn't aware of till later but when I was seven years old I discovered that I had an affinity for music I could pick out a tune on the piano by ear so my mother actually went out and got a piano and set me up with some piano lessons she didn't want me to have her experience of um Yeah.

00:02:55.632 --> 00:02:56.734
I think that was the chain.

00:02:56.955 --> 00:02:58.317
I might be adding a teacher there.

00:02:58.777 --> 00:03:00.762
And she taught me how to play the piano.

00:03:00.801 --> 00:03:02.746
And I was pretty bad because I never practiced.

00:03:02.947 --> 00:03:04.610
But I was a pretty bad piano student.

00:03:04.850 --> 00:03:07.175
And I did that for four years in grade school.

00:03:07.475 --> 00:03:08.298
And then I stopped.

00:03:08.610 --> 00:03:11.412
And then in high school, I wanted to get into music again.

00:03:11.532 --> 00:03:14.594
So I got a synthesizer keyboard because it was the mid 80s.

00:03:14.634 --> 00:03:15.596
And that's what was happening.

00:03:15.915 --> 00:03:20.721
Put a little band together with some other girls in school and we played Duran Duran covers for about a minute.

00:03:21.161 --> 00:03:28.807
And then also growing up Jewish, I was going to synagogue every week and I was learning how to sing in Hebrew without understanding what I was saying at all.

00:03:29.187 --> 00:03:30.989
So and sometimes I didn't even understand.

00:03:31.008 --> 00:03:32.531
I couldn't read very well.

00:03:32.591 --> 00:03:36.935
So I was just mouthing along and making sounds at more or less the right pitch.

00:03:36.974 --> 00:03:38.015
And that seemed to be good enough.

00:03:38.195 --> 00:03:40.718
And that actually I actually tied into learning harmonica later on.

00:03:41.099 --> 00:03:43.443
You picked up harmonica at age 17, I think.

00:03:43.543 --> 00:03:44.865
So how did that come into it?

00:03:45.385 --> 00:03:49.031
I was looking for a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz.

00:03:49.852 --> 00:03:57.062
This was a book I had taken out of the library a few years earlier, and I had learned some basic hand-eye coordination.

00:03:57.103 --> 00:04:02.009
And I thought, well, it'd be great the summer I turned 17 to learn to juggle.

00:04:02.274 --> 00:04:05.575
So I went to a store that should have had the book, but they were out of stock.

00:04:06.038 --> 00:04:11.840
And they had another similar book by the same publisher called called Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless by John Gindick.

00:04:12.341 --> 00:04:15.663
So I thought, well, what the hell, I'll get this instead and I'll play some harmonica.

00:04:16.264 --> 00:04:16.805
Fantastic.

00:04:16.824 --> 00:04:18.505
So what happened to the juggling?

00:04:18.565 --> 00:04:19.326
Did that continue?

00:04:19.526 --> 00:04:24.711
The juggling did not continue, fortunately for myself and everybody and for any breakable objects.

00:04:25.331 --> 00:04:27.374
That is a shame because I also love to juggle.

00:04:27.394 --> 00:04:32.598
And if you listen to the interview with Jersey Smith, who's an Australian, he was a street busker for a long time.

00:04:32.637 --> 00:04:36.060
He does these amazing things while he's juggling and playing the harmonica at the same time.

00:04:36.120 --> 00:04:43.430
So it's not too late, Annie, for you to take up the juggling and do you want to check out jazzy smith on on youtube does some great stuff

00:04:43.874 --> 00:04:44.478
michelle

00:04:44.673 --> 00:04:45.033
Great.

00:04:45.053 --> 00:04:50.658
So yeah, so then you got

00:04:51.339 --> 00:04:57.865
this book from John Gindick.

00:04:57.884 --> 00:04:58.086
Yeah.

00:04:59.005 --> 00:05:02.550
And what about then?

00:05:02.709 --> 00:05:12.338
How did you progress from there?

00:05:14.639 --> 00:05:20.069
but mostly this kind of hippie approach where the instrument is a friend and you build a relationship with it.

00:05:20.249 --> 00:05:23.634
And then the notes themselves are a little bit humanized.

00:05:23.975 --> 00:05:28.482
And you just get a relationship to music that seems intuitive and felt.

00:05:29.244 --> 00:05:30.865
Well, I fall

00:05:32.088 --> 00:05:34.252
in love.

00:05:37.456 --> 00:05:40.701
Well, I fall in love.

00:05:47.394 --> 00:05:55.771
So I was learning how to play and I was still in high school and I would play in the hallways and I'd play at home and I'd play walking to and from school.

00:05:56.372 --> 00:06:06.973
And I would pick out tunes and learn things from the book and I would teach myself things like the Sesame Street theme or the Love Me Do harmonica riff.

00:06:25.185 --> 00:06:28.769
Especially when they're both played on chromatic, but you were playing diatonic at this point.

00:06:28.790 --> 00:06:29.091
Right.

00:06:29.151 --> 00:06:29.831
Only were you, yeah.

00:06:30.331 --> 00:06:32.774
I didn't know what a chromatic was at the time, fortunately.

00:06:33.355 --> 00:06:38.261
About halfway through that semester, a student came up to me and said, I heard you play harmonica.

00:06:38.300 --> 00:06:42.286
He was a junior and I was a senior, so I was sort of a little standoffish with him.

00:06:42.346 --> 00:06:43.286
And I said, yeah.

00:06:43.747 --> 00:06:45.569
And he said, do you like the blues?

00:06:46.050 --> 00:06:47.752
I said, yeah, I think so.

00:06:47.771 --> 00:06:50.615
I think I've heard a little folk and a little blues folk.

00:06:50.675 --> 00:06:52.798
And I thought, yeah, I think I like the bluesy stuff.

00:06:53.026 --> 00:06:55.689
And he said, well, what about Muddy Waters?

00:06:55.709 --> 00:06:56.571
Do you like Muddy Waters?

00:06:56.992 --> 00:06:58.293
And I said, I've heard of them.

00:06:58.334 --> 00:07:05.103
So I thought Muddy Waters was a plural and a group of people called the Muddy Waters.

00:07:06.005 --> 00:07:11.374
So luckily, he had a few cassette tapes of Muddy Waters, and he lent those to me.

00:07:11.394 --> 00:07:14.418
And when I heard those, a really strange thing happened.

00:07:14.458 --> 00:07:22.269
I was always inclined towards music and art, but I wasn't what I considered a viable musician, artist, musician.

00:07:22.658 --> 00:07:23.699
theater person.

00:07:23.718 --> 00:07:26.382
I was a little too much in my head all the time.

00:07:26.403 --> 00:07:31.910
I didn't seem to be able to let go and really live in the art.

00:07:32.271 --> 00:07:34.312
A lot of my friends seem to be able to do that.

00:07:34.333 --> 00:07:38.038
They seem to be deeper and have more to say and a way of saying it.

00:07:38.418 --> 00:07:41.903
So I had sort of consigned myself to a very nerdy future.

00:07:41.944 --> 00:07:48.095
And then when I heard this music, I actually had the epiphany that I never imagined I could have.

00:07:48.134 --> 00:07:53.483
Oh my God, this music is the most incredible right thing I've ever heard.

00:07:53.523 --> 00:07:53.562
It

00:08:01.793 --> 00:08:08.403
didn't

00:08:08.463 --> 00:08:11.947
feel like this music, this musician is better than me.

00:08:12.048 --> 00:08:13.569
It felt like I'm included.

00:08:14.017 --> 00:08:22.846
Felt like everybody was invited to the table, kind of, and that really spoke to me about the music, how warm it was, and the rhythm of it, and just the tone.

00:08:23.507 --> 00:08:29.574
Like most people, certainly a blues player, you hear those old blues greats, and then it just grabs you then.

00:08:29.613 --> 00:08:33.256
So from there, where did you go from there, from your learning?

00:08:34.057 --> 00:08:41.426
From there, I was still in high school, and I had just finished pretty much all of my work for senior year, so I was slacking, officially.

00:08:41.953 --> 00:08:50.105
And I found out that there was a blues jam going on in the next town over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the 1369 Jazz Club.

00:08:50.285 --> 00:08:57.777
And there was a blues jam on Sundays from 1 in the afternoon until 8, hosted by a band called Silas Hubbard and the Hot Ribs.

00:08:58.357 --> 00:08:59.139
So I got there.

00:08:59.500 --> 00:09:01.562
It was about 3 in the afternoon.

00:09:01.663 --> 00:09:03.625
Probably my mom dropped me off.

00:09:03.937 --> 00:09:07.381
And there was a line out front, and there were big glass windows.

00:09:07.442 --> 00:09:13.789
It was an old Victorian-era house that had been turned into a storefront at some point.

00:09:14.190 --> 00:09:21.438
So you couldn't really see inside, but you could hear the bass thrumming out through the bones of the building out onto the sidewalk.

00:09:21.599 --> 00:09:24.022
And there was a line of people waiting to get in.

00:09:24.482 --> 00:09:30.330
Just the sound, it was exactly the sound I had heard probably Calvin Fuzz Jones or someone play with Muddy.

00:09:30.754 --> 00:09:32.397
And that sound was coming out.

00:09:32.576 --> 00:09:34.559
And then you open the door and I finally got in.

00:09:34.600 --> 00:09:36.121
It was the sights and sound.

00:09:36.163 --> 00:09:41.892
It was the red and blue lights and that bass and the piano and the sound of a slow blues playing.

00:09:42.111 --> 00:09:52.609
And then a sort of Bruegel-esque scene of actual adults doing adult things in a bar, drinking and laughing and digging the music.

00:09:53.048 --> 00:10:01.740
And also a somewhat interracial scene because in some parts of Boston, you had neighborhoods that were more mixed at the time.

00:10:01.860 --> 00:10:15.595
So it was a mix of suburban white people, urban white people who hadn't moved out to the suburbs, neighborhood people, working class people, really interesting and just another complete revelation.

00:10:16.196 --> 00:10:18.879
So right away, I was hooked on that now.

00:10:18.958 --> 00:10:20.701
And so I had to keep going back.

00:10:21.041 --> 00:10:23.202
There was a little problem with my being 17.

00:10:23.243 --> 00:10:28.721
And when they finally caught up to me, and found me out, I begged them to let me stay.

00:10:28.760 --> 00:10:32.465
They said, well, if Silas, the band leader, will take responsibility for you, you can stay.

00:10:32.745 --> 00:10:38.030
Because I knew that I couldn't yet get on stage and play, but I really, really wanted to.

00:10:38.091 --> 00:10:44.817
And if I could watch, if I could see what they were doing, I would learn so much faster than if I sat in my living room and tried to piece it together.

00:10:45.278 --> 00:10:45.599
Great.

00:10:45.658 --> 00:10:49.964
So how long did it take you before you did get up and do your first jam then?

00:10:50.403 --> 00:10:52.025
I think it took about three months.

00:10:52.687 --> 00:10:53.307
Terrifying.

00:10:53.366 --> 00:10:55.490
And I don't remember anything except...

00:10:55.874 --> 00:11:00.981
Losing track of where I was in the solo and then somehow finding my way back.

00:11:01.763 --> 00:11:02.003
Yeah.

00:11:02.102 --> 00:11:07.751
So clearly you were, like you say, you were keen to get up on stage and start, you know, getting out there rather than just sitting at home.

00:11:07.831 --> 00:11:09.914
So you'd encourage people to do the same with you.

00:11:10.095 --> 00:11:13.980
You think it's really important to get out there and rather than just sort of, you know, being a bedroom player.

00:11:14.721 --> 00:11:15.322
Absolutely.

00:11:15.342 --> 00:11:17.086
I mean, the scene isn't what it was before.

00:11:17.282 --> 00:11:23.630
30 years ago, 35 years ago, when there were lots of clubs with people playing blues who had played with the old cats.

00:11:23.951 --> 00:11:25.533
That was the situation in Cambridge.

00:11:25.894 --> 00:11:30.940
You had people in the band who had played with Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf when they had come to Cambridge.

00:11:31.221 --> 00:11:36.447
It's harder to find that nowadays, but looking for mentors is so important, I think, too.

00:11:36.488 --> 00:11:37.889
Not just a scene...

00:11:38.274 --> 00:11:40.735
where people play, but also people who can teach you.

00:11:40.755 --> 00:11:43.099
And this town was just full of them.

00:11:43.399 --> 00:11:49.164
The other thing that happened, I would go to the jam and I made friends with people and started going at little parties and things.

00:11:49.245 --> 00:11:54.009
And I think I would play at the party somewhere, but I still wasn't ready to be on a stage.

00:11:54.269 --> 00:12:03.739
And one of the piano players at the jam invited me to join a group called the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, which was basically formed to play arts festivals and parades.

00:12:07.042 --> 00:12:07.261
piano plays

00:12:18.562 --> 00:12:26.504
It was modeled somewhat on the old harmonica bands of the 1930s, but it was an R&B, blues, and rock outfit.

00:12:26.745 --> 00:12:31.258
So imagine 50 harmonica players on a stage playing Born in Chicago.

00:12:31.522 --> 00:12:40.250
together with parts, some playing rhythm parts, some playing lead parts, and then a couple of accordions thrown in and a musical saw and two drummers and a washed up bass.

00:12:40.692 --> 00:12:42.394
And that was the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra.

00:12:42.433 --> 00:12:47.818
So this guy, Eric Two Scoops Moore, see later it was known, brought me down to the parade.

00:12:47.860 --> 00:12:54.866
There was a guy, almost in a cartoonish kind of way, he was throwing things out of a big cardboard box.

00:12:54.927 --> 00:12:57.289
He was distributing t-shirts and harmonicas to people.

00:12:57.826 --> 00:13:01.251
And Eric came up and this guy looked up from the box.

00:13:01.796 --> 00:13:02.923
It was Pierre Beauregard.

00:13:03.330 --> 00:13:05.331
He was the leader of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra.

00:13:05.371 --> 00:13:08.354
And Eric said, Pierre, this is the girl I was telling you about.

00:13:08.394 --> 00:13:10.155
Can she play with the orchestra today?

00:13:10.196 --> 00:13:11.817
And he said, can you bend a note?

00:13:11.977 --> 00:13:14.740
I said, yes, because I had actually learned that a little.

00:13:15.259 --> 00:13:16.822
He said, okay, get her a t-shirt.

00:13:17.461 --> 00:13:21.525
So I got a yellow t-shirt and became a member of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra.

00:13:21.765 --> 00:13:27.510
And that was also an amazing experience because playing in the rhythm section, you learn how to breathe.

00:13:28.030 --> 00:13:47.479
This is an opportunity that I don't think is afforded to enough players nowadays because you go up and you wait for your solo and then you play your solo and then you wait and this was being part of the music at all times and needing to keep up and needing to figure out which direction I was supposed to be playing in and play these little parts these little section parts

00:13:48.039 --> 00:13:51.765
Sounds great I mean very lucky to have that so these were mostly diatonic players were they?

00:13:52.225 --> 00:13:54.827
There were a few chromatic players who played in the lead section.

00:13:55.408 --> 00:13:57.490
It was a real merry band of stragglers.

00:13:57.510 --> 00:14:11.022
I mean, this was kind of like the last caboose on the freak train from the 60s in that you had a lot of old hippies, blues nuts, a few old guys in a subgroup called the Golden Agers who would play the old style chromatic trio.

00:14:11.623 --> 00:14:20.791
Yeah, it was a wonderful thing to encounter in the late 80s, this sort of band of refugees from the 60s who still wanted to get together and do things communally.

00:14:21.211 --> 00:14:22.192
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic.

00:14:22.192 --> 00:14:23.033
place to learn.

00:14:23.072 --> 00:14:28.698
So you're great to have so many harmonica players in a short sort of geographical region as well, I guess.

00:14:29.099 --> 00:14:29.980
Yes, absolutely.

00:14:30.160 --> 00:14:34.144
I'm trying to remember if Sugar Ray Norcia ever dropped in on those shows.

00:14:34.205 --> 00:14:35.807
He was usually busy with the Blue Tones.

00:14:36.047 --> 00:14:45.636
But a lot of the amateur players like Barbecue Bob McGlinty, people who are now mainstays on Facebook and other online harmonica resources, were all around here.

00:14:45.677 --> 00:14:47.759
Chuck Morris for Silas Hubbard.

00:14:48.179 --> 00:14:53.004
Silas's half-brother was Earring George Mayweather, who played with Eddie Taylor Taylor and J.B.

00:14:53.044 --> 00:14:53.946
Hutto in the 50s.

00:14:54.446 --> 00:14:58.269
And the blues jam was really a feature for George.

00:14:58.730 --> 00:15:13.024
George would sit at the front of the bar with a kind of graying high-top hairdo, a three-piece suit, a pocket protector in his breast pocket with pens in it, and a plastic rose on his lapel, and sunglasses, and an earring in one ear.

00:15:13.566 --> 00:15:14.166
Earring George.

00:15:14.486 --> 00:15:17.429
He'd sit at the bar drinking some kind of whiskey.

00:15:17.761 --> 00:15:25.432
And at the appointed time, he would be summoned to the bandstand and he would play a harmonica and he'd sing a version of What I Say.

00:15:27.875 --> 00:15:37.309
What I Say

00:15:40.706 --> 00:15:42.168
and do his shtick.

00:15:42.248 --> 00:15:47.537
He had a great tone and a great sense of selectivity with his notes.

00:15:47.596 --> 00:15:52.544
He could just play one note in just the right spot and it would just honk, make the right sound.

00:15:52.784 --> 00:15:59.355
So he was one of the mentors that I found there, one of the real treasures in Cambridge that a lot of people don't know about.

00:15:59.375 --> 00:15:59.414
So

00:15:59.735 --> 00:16:00.596
you talk about mentors.

00:16:00.616 --> 00:16:03.442
I mean, did you have any harmonica lessons with these people?

00:16:03.461 --> 00:16:05.184
Is it a case of just picking things up from them?

00:16:05.784 --> 00:16:14.272
Before I left for college, the end of that summer, because I had just finished high school, and I played with the CHO all summer, and I played at the Blues Jam all summer.

00:16:14.292 --> 00:16:18.937
And before I left for college, I lined up five lessons with five different people.

00:16:19.879 --> 00:16:29.770
One of them was Chris Stovall-Brown, who's toured for a lot of years with Watermelon Slim now, but he's always been around Boston, always played with the old guys.

00:16:29.791 --> 00:16:35.457
Another guy named Chris Axworthy, a lesson with Barbecue Bob.

00:16:36.258 --> 00:16:38.360
I can't remember the fourth one.

00:16:38.822 --> 00:16:44.551
But the fifth one was a guy I never expected to find around Boston, Jerry Portnoy.

00:16:45.192 --> 00:16:46.533
That came as a complete shock.

00:16:46.553 --> 00:16:51.581
See, I thought all the people I heard on these Muddy Waters tapes were 700 years old and dead.

00:16:52.082 --> 00:16:55.528
There's just no way that this would be some guy living two towns over.

00:16:55.568 --> 00:16:56.549
So

00:16:56.570 --> 00:16:58.813
I took a lesson in person from Jerry Portnoy.

00:16:58.913 --> 00:17:03.400
It was two bus rides to get from Newton to Waltham and sit in his living room.

00:17:03.500 --> 00:17:04.663
And he taught me how to tongue block.

00:17:05.083 --> 00:17:07.826
So that was the lesson I brought with me when I went off to college.

00:17:08.588 --> 00:17:09.028
Fantastic.

00:17:09.048 --> 00:17:09.230
Yeah.

00:17:09.349 --> 00:17:11.212
Great to have Jerry on the doorstep, like you say.

00:17:11.252 --> 00:17:19.365
So, you know, returning back then to the first book you got, the John Gindic one, what harmonica did you have as your first harmonica?

00:17:19.684 --> 00:17:21.647
It was a harmonica that came with the book.

00:17:21.667 --> 00:17:22.670
It was called The Pocket Pal.

00:17:23.009 --> 00:17:27.300
So did you carry on playing the piano during this time or did you devote yourself to the harmonica then?

00:17:27.942 --> 00:17:30.469
I wasn't really devoted to the piano at that point anyway.

00:17:30.509 --> 00:17:34.077
We still had the piano, so I would still try to figure things out.

00:17:34.218 --> 00:17:35.520
I didn't know how to improvise.

00:17:35.905 --> 00:17:36.928
And that was a problem.

00:17:37.509 --> 00:17:42.616
Even people who didn't care as much about it as I did seemed to know how to improvise.

00:17:42.656 --> 00:17:45.461
And I would ask friends in high school, like, how do you do this?

00:17:45.561 --> 00:17:49.929
What part of your brain needs to separate from what other part of your brain to make this happen?

00:17:50.230 --> 00:17:53.174
So I really didn't understand the nature of it at all.

00:17:53.214 --> 00:18:05.449
And it wasn't like I was a great reader of music either, but I just didn't quite equate the improvisations that I heard with the way that that we all naturally improvise even in conversation.

00:18:05.789 --> 00:18:07.592
I didn't put it together with music at that point.

00:18:07.892 --> 00:18:08.973
So that became a quest.

00:18:09.554 --> 00:18:11.656
Well, we'll get on to when we get into your recordings.

00:18:11.737 --> 00:18:17.403
You started recording singing and then also I believe you've taken up the mandolin quite recently, is it?

00:18:28.817 --> 00:18:30.759
Yeah, that's jumping forward quite a bit.

00:18:31.441 --> 00:18:32.041
So I still...

00:18:32.609 --> 00:18:34.732
would maintain a relationship with the piano.

00:18:34.932 --> 00:18:35.753
When I came home from...

00:18:36.054 --> 00:18:41.520
I dropped out of college to play harmonica with a band at the 1369 called Some Blues by Butch.

00:18:41.961 --> 00:18:43.223
And that was when I was 18.

00:18:43.903 --> 00:18:47.528
So I was really focused on the harmonica, but I would still play the piano.

00:18:47.588 --> 00:18:49.330
And I started writing songs on the piano.

00:18:49.592 --> 00:18:53.616
That was a way I could give myself a chord and some understanding of the music.

00:18:54.076 --> 00:18:55.679
And I also would teach harmonica.

00:18:55.700 --> 00:18:58.442
I started teaching when I was 19 in front of the piano.

00:18:58.762 --> 00:19:00.546
So I was always moving...

00:19:00.897 --> 00:19:05.883
forward a little bit with the piano when I started listening to different kinds of blues.

00:19:06.663 --> 00:19:10.968
There was a guy at the 1369 named Johnny Jammer, and he was an amazing player.

00:19:10.988 --> 00:19:17.075
He could play really fast with good tone, kind of in the Butterfield School, but also with more Big Walter-esque tone somehow.

00:19:17.234 --> 00:19:22.759
If you could merge both halves of an offer you can't refuse, and then speed it up, it would sound like this guy.

00:19:23.121 --> 00:19:34.236
He gave me cassette tapes of Junior Wells' Sunny Boy II, More Muddy Waters, George Smith, William Clark, James Cotton, Big Walter.

00:19:34.375 --> 00:19:35.940
He gave me all the good stuff.

00:19:36.381 --> 00:19:39.028
He gave me 10 cassette tapes and I took those to college with me.

00:19:39.147 --> 00:19:43.157
And that was my required listening every hour of every day.

00:19:43.521 --> 00:19:49.107
And Charlie Musselwhite as well, and a couple of compilations, Johnny Shines and Johnny Young.

00:19:49.167 --> 00:19:51.109
A lot of Little Walter that I'd never heard.

00:19:51.150 --> 00:19:58.237
So that became my education while I was in college, was these 10 cassette tapes and the lesson I had recorded from Jerry's.

00:19:58.857 --> 00:20:02.260
I've also seen that you're quite a fan of Slim Harpo's playing.

00:20:02.701 --> 00:20:03.261
Slim Harpo.

00:20:03.343 --> 00:20:05.505
Actually, I got a tape of Slim Harpo from another guy.

00:20:05.525 --> 00:20:10.490
I also brought that to college, and that was a huge influence at that time because I was learning tongue-blocking.

00:20:11.009 --> 00:20:14.375
And I suddenly put it together that that's what Slim Harpo was doing.

00:20:14.996 --> 00:20:20.203
And while I was listening to Slim Harpo, I was learning how to play in first and third position, and I didn't know it.

00:20:20.765 --> 00:20:23.769
I didn't know anything about positions, but that's what Slim Harpo does.

00:20:23.849 --> 00:20:31.260
He just takes the same riff and plays it in a different key in the same place, and suddenly it's third position.

00:20:31.761 --> 00:20:34.346
Yeah, so from my understanding of Slim Harpo, he was pretty...

00:20:34.753 --> 00:21:00.066
successful commercially um you know when he was around and playing so he kind of popularized probably quite a lot of blues but He also, I think he played harmonica on a rack most of the time, didn't he?

00:21:00.647 --> 00:21:05.598
You know, I'm just not sure if he did or not, because I don't know enough about Slim Harpo.

00:21:05.699 --> 00:21:09.989
There's always that picture of him with a guitar, but I don't think he was really a guitar player.

00:21:10.028 --> 00:21:11.771
His

00:21:11.833 --> 00:21:12.835
thing was really harmonica.

00:21:12.875 --> 00:21:15.820
Unfortunately, he died way too early.

00:21:16.258 --> 00:21:20.605
just when he was about to become a huge hit, just after he cashed the check from the Rolling Stones.

00:21:21.066 --> 00:21:24.371
Kenny Neal was telling me that he was a Baton Rouge guy.

00:21:24.391 --> 00:21:33.606
He was still doing the work that he'd been doing before he became a musician, which was working on heavy equipment, like big truck engines and things.

00:21:34.127 --> 00:21:41.259
And I believe he was trying to lift an engine out of a chassis when he basically popped a blood vessel or something.

00:21:41.279 --> 00:21:42.381
And that was it.

00:21:42.945 --> 00:21:46.189
He wasn't old, but he just overtaxed himself doing that.

00:21:46.588 --> 00:21:49.010
Really a shame because he would have been all over TV.

00:21:49.050 --> 00:21:52.253
There'd be so much Slim Harpo footage we could have all watched and listened to.

00:21:52.294 --> 00:22:01.182
So going back then to the comment you're saying you dropped out of college to pursue a life in harmonica at the age of 18, how did your parents take to that decision?

00:22:02.202 --> 00:22:03.163
Well, might you ask?

00:22:03.604 --> 00:22:11.471
It was a little touch and go, but ultimately they felt, I think, protective of me enough not to just throw me out of the house.

00:22:11.770 --> 00:22:18.917
There were conversations where there seemed like an ultimatum might be in the offing, but ultimately they sort of backed down.

00:22:19.318 --> 00:22:25.484
My mother was an artist too, and she had always encouraged us to put our troubles into our art.

00:22:25.586 --> 00:22:27.406
So she couldn't really argue with the idea of that.

00:22:27.807 --> 00:22:33.233
They made it a condition of my living at home and saving on rent that I would get a day job, which I did.

00:22:33.534 --> 00:22:38.098
I went out to the local grocery store and became a deli worker by day.

00:22:38.199 --> 00:22:44.626
And then by night, going to the blues jams and going out to clubs and seeing James Cotton and trying to grow up really fast.

00:22:45.122 --> 00:22:45.663
Yeah, great.

00:22:45.982 --> 00:22:51.369
But you were able to, from an early stage, you were able to make a decent amount of money out of the music, were you?

00:22:52.332 --> 00:22:53.313
No, actually.

00:22:53.353 --> 00:22:57.377
First, it was just the jams and the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, and those gigs didn't pay.

00:22:58.299 --> 00:23:02.164
When I joined this band, the Blues by Butch, I assumed it was a job.

00:23:02.585 --> 00:23:09.555
But what usually happened was, I think the whole band got paid$75, and they probably drank about twice that.

00:23:11.037 --> 00:23:14.981
So the bar tab got paid, and I didn't.

00:23:15.170 --> 00:23:15.671
I don't think.

00:23:15.851 --> 00:23:21.058
Also, I had a Tweed amp that I'd gotten through one of the guys in town.

00:23:21.078 --> 00:23:26.969
I bought this kind of a Fender Deluxe, a Fender 210 Super it was called.

00:23:26.989 --> 00:23:32.758
It was really a cut down 410 basement that had been put in a smaller case and wired like that.

00:23:32.778 --> 00:23:36.502
1954, great sound and it really heavy.

00:23:36.522 --> 00:23:47.711
And I would pick up this amp and carry it two blocks to the bus stop to get a bus to the next place where I would get off that bus and wait for another bus to take me to Cambridge.

00:23:47.893 --> 00:23:52.480
And then from there, I would walk a couple of blocks and get another bus to get to where the club was.

00:23:52.901 --> 00:23:58.670
And I did that a few times before I started wising up and realizing it'd be better to spend a few dollars on a taxi.

00:23:59.210 --> 00:24:02.976
But I was very dedicated to getting there and doing my job.

00:24:03.376 --> 00:24:05.840
Trying to think of when I actually got paid for a gig.

00:24:05.881 --> 00:24:08.684
I might have gotten$15 if the band didn't...

00:24:09.314 --> 00:24:11.858
use the money to pay the tab because I didn't drink at all.

00:24:12.239 --> 00:24:12.799
You know, I couldn't.

00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:14.083
It would have been illegal.

00:24:14.523 --> 00:24:15.986
And I didn't even want to risk it.

00:24:16.006 --> 00:24:24.342
A couple of years after that, I got a gig playing with a woman named Shirley Lewis, the Shirley Lewis Experience.

00:24:24.738 --> 00:24:28.403
And she had more of a show band and she ran it in a more business-like way.

00:24:28.442 --> 00:24:30.285
And then I would make actually some decent money.

00:24:30.625 --> 00:24:36.172
And at that point, when I was working steadily with her, I felt like I was ready to leave the day job.

00:24:36.192 --> 00:24:37.534
But it took about three or four years.

00:24:38.114 --> 00:24:40.637
And in the meantime, Butch unfortunately passed away.

00:24:40.678 --> 00:24:50.549
That was an amazing ride playing with Butch because he taught me really how to improvise, how to play for my soul, how to tell a story, everything in that band.

00:24:50.849 --> 00:24:52.316
So it was much more than a gig.

00:24:52.837 --> 00:24:53.621
It wasn't a money gig.

00:24:53.641 --> 00:25:03.732
So when you were learning and improving at this stage, and then also through your musical career, How would you describe your practice routine?

00:25:03.993 --> 00:25:06.336
How did you initially start practicing and how has that evolved?

00:25:06.777 --> 00:25:08.739
I never really had a practice routine.

00:25:08.759 --> 00:25:10.320
I would just play.

00:25:10.561 --> 00:25:15.267
When I was studying from the book, I would actually study and try to work through the lessons.

00:25:15.887 --> 00:25:20.953
But when I was practicing, I might play the tape of the lesson I'd taken from Jerry and go over it.

00:25:21.434 --> 00:25:25.767
But more often than not, I was just studying and I was just into playing.

00:25:25.928 --> 00:25:34.837
Also, I learned from Pierre how to draw a schematic of the harmonica and understand where the notes and where the different keys were in the different positions.

00:25:35.378 --> 00:25:36.621
So I started doing that.

00:25:36.661 --> 00:25:46.492
One of the reasons I was able to drop out of school, I thought, was in addition to playing in this band, I was going to be working for Pierre and his partner, Magic Dick, tuning harmonicas for their company.

00:25:46.712 --> 00:25:51.679
That turned out to be a little late to materialize, but I did learn how to tune harmonicas in the meantime.

00:25:52.519 --> 00:25:54.061
So I was always learning and always...

00:25:54.465 --> 00:25:58.810
working on things and always getting mentored by my various band leaders.

00:25:59.371 --> 00:26:06.378
But after Butch passed away, about a year after Butch passed away in 92, somebody called with a cancellation.

00:26:06.419 --> 00:26:08.101
They needed a band to fill in.

00:26:08.141 --> 00:26:10.303
And did I have a band?

00:26:10.663 --> 00:26:14.548
Well, I didn't have a band, but I think it was Pierre recommended that I call Paul Rochelle.

00:26:15.008 --> 00:26:17.872
And Paul turned out had a rhythm section and a PA system.

00:26:18.271 --> 00:26:19.933
And I had the gig and I had a car.

00:26:20.193 --> 00:26:24.664
And between all that, we actually had the ability to get to and play said gig.

00:26:25.247 --> 00:26:27.772
That was the beginning of us playing together in late 92.

00:26:27.792 --> 00:26:34.430
piano plays

00:26:44.097 --> 00:26:44.397
Yeah.

00:26:44.478 --> 00:26:48.301
So let's get on to your partnership with Paul Rochelle, as you mentioned there.

00:26:48.402 --> 00:26:53.685
So I think you were 22, I think, when you first met Paul and started playing with him.

00:26:53.705 --> 00:26:55.107
And he was 42, was he?

00:26:55.788 --> 00:26:56.028
Yes.

00:26:56.067 --> 00:26:58.931
Actually, we'd met a couple of years before I'd sat in with his band.

00:26:59.171 --> 00:27:04.635
He had a harmonica player named Arnie Fox, another sort of butterfieldy player, great big guy and funny.

00:27:04.655 --> 00:27:09.220
I think Pierre introduced me to Arnie and Arnie invited me to come down in here and play with Paul.

00:27:09.640 --> 00:27:11.020
And then I sat in at the end of the night.

00:27:11.521 --> 00:27:20.153
One of the things I noticed about Paul that made it really stay out from other players in town was that he was a guitar player who was playing harmonica-friendly material.

00:27:20.193 --> 00:27:22.244
Everybody at that time was...

00:27:22.786 --> 00:27:24.127
super into B.B.

00:27:24.188 --> 00:27:26.471
King, Albert King, Freddie King.

00:27:26.510 --> 00:27:33.020
And even though there were lots of great harmonica players in town, there weren't a lot of people who would play parts that supported the harmonica.

00:27:33.622 --> 00:27:35.944
You know, Robert Lockwood, for instance, kind of parts.

00:27:36.506 --> 00:27:40.612
So Paul was playing Sonny Boy's Keep It to Yourself or something when I sat in with him.

00:27:40.632 --> 00:27:41.953
I thought, this is great.

00:27:42.034 --> 00:27:43.675
I can actually sink my teeth into something.

00:27:44.237 --> 00:27:49.965
Because Butch and I had been doing that kind of material, but that wasn't commonplace in town at the time.

00:27:50.433 --> 00:27:57.704
So a couple of years later, when I played this band show with Paul, I was able to keep up with that kind of material.

00:27:58.326 --> 00:28:03.594
And then I had actually sat in with Paul a year before that for a duo gig.

00:28:03.894 --> 00:28:07.800
I think when Butch had fallen ill, I called Paul to fill in for that.

00:28:08.101 --> 00:28:11.365
And that was really strange because that was country blues.

00:28:11.506 --> 00:28:14.770
And I thought country blues, that's like acoustic blues.

00:28:14.791 --> 00:28:16.213
That must be like Jimmy Reed.

00:28:16.609 --> 00:28:21.478
I thought it was real simple, two strings on the guitar, or like Muddy Waters' folk singer.

00:28:21.678 --> 00:28:22.759
Like, I got this.

00:28:23.260 --> 00:28:26.045
And then Paul started playing Michigan Water or something.

00:28:26.486 --> 00:28:28.709
And I thought, what is going on?

00:28:28.729 --> 00:28:30.592
I have no idea what to play.

00:28:30.612 --> 00:28:32.515
I have no idea what the time is.

00:28:32.575 --> 00:28:34.617
There were all kinds of poly rhythms going on.

00:28:35.259 --> 00:28:36.922
It was so different from what I had heard.

00:28:36.942 --> 00:28:42.029
It sounded good, but I was having trouble figuring out what would work with it.

00:28:42.170 --> 00:28:47.625
And so I just laid way back and tried not to do anything that would sound bad with it, which was tricky.

00:28:47.945 --> 00:28:49.426
So I did a lot of not playing, which he

00:28:49.446 --> 00:29:05.805
appreciated.

00:29:08.426 --> 00:29:08.788
So great.

00:29:08.807 --> 00:29:14.493
So yeah, so you teamed up with him and you were playing, what, jams at first with him and that progressed to getting gigs and things, did it?

00:29:15.041 --> 00:29:16.144
No jams.

00:29:16.184 --> 00:29:17.028
He wouldn't go to jams.

00:29:17.048 --> 00:29:22.544
He and his wife had a baby, and so he was home a lot when he wasn't working.

00:29:23.125 --> 00:29:29.726
So I didn't meet him at jams, just sitting in with him on one gig and then hiring him for a gig and then working.

00:29:29.857 --> 00:29:31.623
And then putting together this show.

00:29:31.682 --> 00:29:35.011
But once that happened, he started hiring me to play with him.

00:29:35.313 --> 00:29:37.258
Paul was better established being 20 years older.

00:29:37.900 --> 00:29:39.144
So he had work in town.

00:29:39.163 --> 00:29:40.607
He had just made an album.

00:29:40.647 --> 00:29:45.300
He was getting reviews and he had a lot of cred in town.

00:29:45.953 --> 00:29:48.739
So when I started working with him, it was very exciting.

00:29:48.778 --> 00:29:53.588
It was like being asked to the prom by the most popular boy in school, in my mind, anyway.

00:29:53.909 --> 00:29:57.395
But it was very exciting to be asked to join him on the road.

00:29:57.676 --> 00:30:00.582
And we started touring around together with the band.

00:30:01.123 --> 00:30:02.164
So that's where that started.

00:30:02.244 --> 00:30:08.577
But he also had a steady gig playing every Wednesday, opening for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters at a little bar.

00:30:08.930 --> 00:30:12.355
And so I started going out there and sitting in with him there.

00:30:12.394 --> 00:30:19.884
And then his wife, who was his manager, his wife, Leslie, said, well, why don't you start just playing these gigs with Paul for hire?

00:30:20.184 --> 00:30:23.608
And I said, oh, Lord, you know, I know there's not a lot of money in these things.

00:30:23.630 --> 00:30:25.471
I don't want to take money out of his pocket.

00:30:25.791 --> 00:30:27.634
And she said, well, look, he doesn't drive.

00:30:27.674 --> 00:30:29.857
So when he plays, I drive him.

00:30:29.897 --> 00:30:32.761
So it's like he's getting paid for two people anyway.

00:30:33.185 --> 00:30:40.102
She says, if you go out and work with them and you guys set up the PA system, I can stay home and see my kid once in a while.

00:30:40.544 --> 00:30:43.482
So she convinced me that that it was the right thing to do.

00:30:43.522 --> 00:30:48.488
Then he got a steady gig at the first House of Blues, the prototype House of Blues in Cambridge.

00:30:48.768 --> 00:30:52.310
We had a lunchtime gig there and then the evening gig at the Sitting Bowl.

00:30:52.711 --> 00:30:58.375
So we weren't really officially music partners at the time, but he kept calling me to work on these shows.

00:30:58.435 --> 00:31:02.019
And then Leslie would call me and start arranging tours and things.

00:31:02.099 --> 00:31:03.820
So we started working more steadily.

00:31:04.260 --> 00:31:14.392
And I was still freelancing and playing with lots of other people, but it definitely made me more desirable as a player or something because people knew I played with paul so suddenly i i raided

00:31:14.432 --> 00:31:38.430
definitely yeah and so you went on to record i think seven albums with paul so the first one in 96 was i i want you to know um where you're doing a combination of um a combination of you know acoustic and amplified playing so

00:31:42.786 --> 00:31:43.228
That's right.

00:31:43.248 --> 00:31:44.311
That's what was happening.

00:31:44.613 --> 00:31:48.126
Paul, at the time, was a solo player when he wasn't playing in a band.

00:31:48.166 --> 00:31:50.174
His main thing was playing country blues.

00:31:50.375 --> 00:31:52.565
That's what he taught himself first.

00:31:53.026 --> 00:31:58.411
And that's what he had learned sitting around with Sun House and Sonny Terry and playing with those guys.

00:31:59.171 --> 00:32:03.674
So that was his first and his main love, but he was playing in the band just to have work.

00:32:04.256 --> 00:32:07.558
My concept had really come from the Chicago style band stuff.

00:32:07.578 --> 00:32:10.540
So I was learning about the country blues each time we played together.

00:32:10.560 --> 00:32:13.523
Sometimes we would have gigs where we'd open up for ourselves.

00:32:13.584 --> 00:32:16.066
We'd play a duo set and then play a band set.

00:32:16.566 --> 00:32:20.769
And then your second album was Moving to the Country in 2000.

00:32:21.069 --> 00:32:24.734
And this one, you won a WC Yes,

00:32:38.577 --> 00:32:40.361
that was good for us in a lot of ways.

00:32:40.882 --> 00:32:47.593
Actually, before I want you to know, I recorded, Paul asked me to record on his album in progress at the time called Swear to Tell the Truth.

00:32:48.294 --> 00:32:48.413
Mm-hmm.

00:32:48.705 --> 00:32:58.244
And I ended up playing on, I can't remember if I played on any of the acoustic tracks or not, but there was another harmonica player, the records producer, Richard Rosenblatt, who played on it.

00:32:58.484 --> 00:32:59.788
And then Paul asked me to play on it.

00:32:59.887 --> 00:33:02.854
And I think it was two or three songs that I played on.

00:33:02.894 --> 00:33:06.200
And we got the band in the studio and did that.

00:33:06.260 --> 00:33:07.943
And then I actually helped mix the record too.

00:33:08.605 --> 00:33:10.910
So that was a run up to the partnership.

00:33:11.329 --> 00:33:15.884
By 94, we sort of became more officially music partners.

00:33:16.586 --> 00:33:21.480
Around this time, Paul's wife fell ill with breast cancer in 1994.

00:33:21.520 --> 00:33:24.249
They had the young daughter, seven years old.

00:33:24.738 --> 00:33:29.582
People knocking at the door and John Sebastian called up Paul and said, I want you to play with me.

00:33:29.962 --> 00:33:31.923
And everything was kind of happening all at once.

00:33:32.325 --> 00:33:39.530
We were starting to take off and she was saying, go out and work as much as you possibly can so that you can get established while you still can.

00:33:40.030 --> 00:33:45.796
Really a tumultuous time and a lot of great things were happening and a lot of terrible things as well.

00:33:46.277 --> 00:33:48.638
So it's like she was very understanding and supportive.

00:33:49.098 --> 00:33:49.900
Oh, more than that.

00:33:49.980 --> 00:33:55.365
She was a visionary and she actually could see things happening and playing out years into the future.

00:33:55.384 --> 00:33:57.688
So when she told us to do things, we listened.

00:33:58.949 --> 00:33:59.109
Good.

00:33:59.150 --> 00:34:04.395
And then another album you did with Paul was Going Home, I think in 2004.

00:34:04.616 --> 00:34:07.480
I've got you were singing on a song, Black Eye Blues.

00:34:07.601 --> 00:34:10.885
So, you know, at what point did you sort of start singing more with Paul and recording?

00:34:12.045 --> 00:34:14.389
Oh God, I have such a weird history with singing.

00:34:15.210 --> 00:34:19.496
I liked to sing sometimes around the house and with people, but I wasn't a singer.

00:34:19.536 --> 00:34:22.818
I But people would tell me not to sing.

00:34:23.119 --> 00:34:24.481
So I got kind of weird about it.

00:34:25.021 --> 00:34:26.103
I got really self-conscious.

00:34:26.163 --> 00:34:27.523
And then that made it sound even worse.

00:34:28.465 --> 00:34:30.688
So I've always really struggled with it.

00:34:31.128 --> 00:34:33.550
Wanted to, but felt very repressed about singing.

00:34:33.650 --> 00:34:37.675
So for the first several years of playing, I didn't even attempt to sing.

00:34:38.295 --> 00:34:42.420
Butch told me one time, look, I didn't hire you to try to play harmonica in my band.

00:34:42.460 --> 00:34:43.621
So don't try to sing.

00:34:43.641 --> 00:34:45.722
I said, all right, I can't try to sing.

00:34:45.762 --> 00:34:46.543
I have to just sing.

00:34:47.083 --> 00:34:48.606
But it was really hard to figure that out.

00:34:49.217 --> 00:34:50.900
But Paul got me to sing Gotta Fly.

00:34:50.960 --> 00:34:52.360
That was my song that I wrote.

00:34:52.460 --> 00:34:53.762
And he came up with the guitar part.

00:34:54.822 --> 00:35:14.181
So that was a couple of years in to our partnership that I started singing.

00:35:14.322 --> 00:35:15.523
And Paul's such a good singer.

00:35:15.563 --> 00:35:17.585
I didn't feel like anything was missing.

00:35:18.242 --> 00:35:21.585
But that was sort of where it started because I was always writing songs.

00:35:21.806 --> 00:35:24.650
I just didn't necessarily hear myself singing them.

00:35:25.471 --> 00:35:29.474
Yeah, but I talk a lot on here about the value of being able to sing as a harmonica player.

00:35:29.534 --> 00:35:32.679
So something you think was well worth it for you.

00:35:33.380 --> 00:35:35.181
Well, it still is, and it's still a struggle.

00:35:35.222 --> 00:35:41.550
The harmonica is such a good instrument for giving a voice to a voiceless person.

00:35:42.306 --> 00:35:52.978
a person who can't be heard any other way, who can't find the words or who isn't allowed to let the words out, but the sound and the feeling are clear as day.

00:35:53.634 --> 00:35:56.257
So the harmonica is really my instrument that way.

00:35:56.277 --> 00:36:02.423
I mean, I really feel like it translates feelings directly and sings on its own.

00:36:03.005 --> 00:36:09.552
I've tried to make a study of singing at times, but it's not really my instrument per se, because I don't feel like a natural that way.

00:36:09.952 --> 00:36:16.581
I really have struggled with it, and I haven't been able to buckle down and get a lot better at it.

00:36:16.960 --> 00:36:17.541
But I love...

00:36:17.793 --> 00:36:30.463
singers and I love the idea of singing with a real voice and when I say a voice I don't mean just like a good voice like a good set of pipes but the ability to convey a story through singing words.

00:36:31.184 --> 00:36:39.255
The song that I feel has really helped me break through to another level is Bessie Smith's You've Been a Good Old Wagon, which we've tried to record a couple times.

00:36:39.355 --> 00:36:45.041
I'm hoping to get it on our next record, but we have gotten some pretty good live versions of it that are out there on

00:36:46.043 --> 00:36:49.626
YouTube.

00:36:49.646 --> 00:36:57.215
When a rain man can be found, you've been a good old wagon.

00:36:58.257 --> 00:37:00.306
Dad So

00:37:01.309 --> 00:37:20.235
I noticed there are two songs on the Going Home album where you're playing chromatic on one of them.

00:37:22.637 --> 00:37:22.717
Yeah.

00:37:25.922 --> 00:37:30.210
What about using the chromatic and how you learned that and incorporated that?

00:37:31.431 --> 00:37:37.583
I think I got my first chromatic when I was in my early 20s and I was learning how to play some third position blues.

00:37:38.324 --> 00:37:39.967
That's just breathing in, basically.

00:37:40.307 --> 00:37:46.539
Tongue blocking, playing octave style and playing wider octaves or narrower sevenths and sixths.

00:37:47.139 --> 00:37:49.545
It also made such a nice sound by itself.

00:37:49.644 --> 00:37:50.126
I didn't feel...

00:37:50.465 --> 00:37:57.802
And I still don't feel like I can really create that sense of voice and character through the chromatic, but that's what I try to do.

00:37:57.822 --> 00:38:02.333
When I was 21 or so, I went out to Detroit to the Spock Convention.

00:38:02.690 --> 00:38:05.992
They were having the spa and the world championships the same year.

00:38:06.032 --> 00:38:08.894
And I went out there and met all these great cats.

00:38:09.295 --> 00:38:13.458
And Charlie Layton was the giant among them, in my mind.

00:38:13.880 --> 00:38:27.612
I sat in the lobby of this hotel with a crowd of other harmonica geeks and geeked out to Howard Levy and Charlie Layton having like a 15, 20 minute throwdown, a medley of every jazz quote you could ever imagine.

00:38:28.112 --> 00:38:29.132
And I taped everything.

00:38:29.193 --> 00:38:31.795
I would go around with my Walkman and record live shows.

00:38:32.215 --> 00:38:35.699
Charlie Layton If you haven't heard him, he's a must hear.

00:38:35.719 --> 00:38:37.742
He kind of completes the circle.

00:38:37.802 --> 00:38:44.771
If you're a tone junkie and you listen to lots of Big Walter and you love tone, then Charlie Layton is the natural extension of that on the chromatic.

00:38:45.092 --> 00:38:46.614
It's got such a beautiful sound.

00:38:46.653 --> 00:38:49.677
And like Jerry Portnoy, too, he plays very languidly.

00:38:49.697 --> 00:38:49.717
¦

00:39:04.769 --> 00:39:09.416
Another album you released with Paul Rochelle was A Night in Woodstock, which is also a DVD.

00:39:09.476 --> 00:39:11.338
And there's some great videos on YouTube.

00:39:11.358 --> 00:39:12.380
I put some links onto those.

00:39:12.440 --> 00:39:13.862
So yeah, it's a nice live one.

00:39:14.282 --> 00:39:20.831
What had happened was when we made Going Home in 2003, 2004, the record industry was tanking.

00:39:21.393 --> 00:39:28.382
And with our unerring timing, we managed to make a record right as the bottom was dropping out of the CD market.

00:39:28.643 --> 00:39:33.650
At the record company we were on at the time, Tone Cool got absorbed and garroted by it.

00:39:33.985 --> 00:39:35.807
by the record company that bought it.

00:39:36.409 --> 00:39:38.692
We lost our catalog of all our recordings.

00:39:38.731 --> 00:39:39.813
They all got bought up.

00:39:40.293 --> 00:39:45.681
And our new release was going to be basically not canned, but just left to die.

00:39:46.961 --> 00:39:53.590
So I sort of took over on the business side, trying to promote it and get the word out about it as much as I could.

00:39:53.670 --> 00:39:56.094
But there wasn't that much hope for record promotion.

00:39:56.454 --> 00:39:59.498
And after that, we decided to start our own record company.

00:39:59.873 --> 00:40:11.403
And around that time, we met Todd Quaid, who was filming this documentary about jug band music with John Sebastian called Chase and Gus's Ghost, which became the documentary and the title of John's album that we were on.

00:40:11.824 --> 00:40:16.728
He offered to film us so that he could use a clip in the documentary, and he paid for the whole thing.

00:40:16.768 --> 00:40:21.773
We ended up having this gig in Woodstock just coincidentally around the same time.

00:40:21.853 --> 00:40:26.396
So he brought the crew out, film crew with major, huge cameras.

00:40:26.797 --> 00:40:28.878
But there was a ground problem in the club.

00:40:29.840 --> 00:40:36.347
front of house board and the monitor board, there were two separate electrical services coming into the same club.

00:40:36.668 --> 00:40:40.112
And I guess the front of house and the back of house were on two separate systems.

00:40:40.793 --> 00:40:45.577
And there was this ground hum that practically rewired the whole building to try to eliminate it.

00:40:46.378 --> 00:40:49.643
But there's still a little bit of sound in there.

00:40:50.103 --> 00:40:59.094
But other than that, other than waiting five or 10 hours to play while they rewired the building, and Paul had about 10 cognacs while he was waiting, everything went smoothly after that.

00:40:59.617 --> 00:41:01.621
Yeah, no, it's great to have the DVD.

00:41:01.641 --> 00:41:03.083
It looks pretty good quality filming.

00:41:03.764 --> 00:41:04.063
Oh, yeah.

00:41:04.344 --> 00:41:05.266
They did an amazing job.

00:41:05.445 --> 00:41:08.931
That company, Nevesa, they do major shows all over the world.

00:41:09.210 --> 00:41:09.791
Yeah, it looks great.

00:41:09.811 --> 00:41:11.014
It's great to have that one down, yeah.

00:41:11.454 --> 00:41:14.237
And so as well as playing with Paul, you mentioned obviously you play with other people.

00:41:14.277 --> 00:41:15.860
So just mention a few of those.

00:41:15.920 --> 00:41:17.463
You play with Pinetop Perkins.

00:41:22.610 --> 00:41:22.909
Pinetop Perkins.

00:41:31.681 --> 00:41:35.407
He was Moneywater's piano player for quite a long time.

00:41:35.447 --> 00:41:36.630
So how did that come about?

00:41:37.632 --> 00:41:47.188
Little Mike and the Tornadoes were backing up Pinetop on tour at that time and they came up to a real joint in Worcester called the Gilrains in a funky part of town.

00:41:47.929 --> 00:41:48.990
But it was a great blues club.

00:41:49.030 --> 00:41:50.393
Everybody came through there.

00:41:50.974 --> 00:41:55.340
So they were playing at Gilrains and I met Little Mike and he invited me to come up and sit in.

00:41:55.362 --> 00:42:00.545
And I never realized before that How integral all those parts were.

00:42:01.507 --> 00:42:05.114
When I thought of Muddy Waters or when I thought of Little Walter, I thought just of the harmonica.

00:42:05.554 --> 00:42:09.481
I didn't realize the support system that went into making that sound.

00:42:10.362 --> 00:42:15.873
Being able to play with Pinetop comping behind me just taught me how important the band is.

00:42:16.494 --> 00:42:20.961
People can't just get up and strum chords behind you and have it be that sound.

00:42:21.463 --> 00:42:23.166
Everything has to work together.

00:42:23.554 --> 00:42:24.534
Yeah, superb to get that.

00:42:24.554 --> 00:42:30.282
And then you played with Susan Tedeschi and also John Sebastian, who's another harmonica player.

00:42:30.422 --> 00:42:33.364
He guested on an album with you, didn't he?

00:42:33.385 --> 00:42:38.871
And there's a recording of you playing Orange Dew Blues on YouTube, which is a good clip as well.

00:42:51.405 --> 00:42:51.485
Yeah.

00:42:53.057 --> 00:42:57.204
That's right.

00:42:57.284 --> 00:43:02.411
Orange Dude is actually the nickname for Fritz Richman, the jug player who had passed away that year.

00:43:02.431 --> 00:43:04.594
So we're doing it kind of in tribute to him.

00:43:05.016 --> 00:43:06.438
Yeah, I started playing with Susan.

00:43:06.458 --> 00:43:08.460
I think I'd already started playing with Paul.

00:43:08.862 --> 00:43:14.130
And the Boston Blues scene was kind of percolating at that point because the House of Blues had just opened up.

00:43:14.465 --> 00:43:19.630
And Susan reminded me once that she and I were the first women to play on that stage at the House of Blues.

00:43:20.271 --> 00:43:23.594
But she was an up and coming recent Berklee College of Music graduate.

00:43:23.914 --> 00:43:31.721
She was playing in bands and trying to get her stage legs, or she had stage legs, but she was trying to get her band legs together, having a band and running it.

00:43:32.181 --> 00:43:34.784
And she was taking a couple of guitar lessons from Paul.

00:43:35.123 --> 00:43:39.967
And she hired me to play with her because my name was better known in Boston than hers was.

00:43:40.007 --> 00:43:44.431
And she could get some gigs on the strength of my being in the band, which is one of my favorites.

00:43:44.431 --> 00:43:45.161
favorite ironies.

00:44:01.217 --> 00:44:06.503
You mentioned that you're some of the first females playing, so we'll touch on that subject now.

00:44:06.543 --> 00:44:12.126
So you're probably one of the first female blues players, it's fair to say, and you've been described as the queen of the blues harmonica.

00:44:12.146 --> 00:44:15.349
So what's it like being a female blues harmonica player?

00:44:15.891 --> 00:44:19.434
It wasn't my intent, certainly, to go out and be a female blues harmonica player.

00:44:19.514 --> 00:44:21.695
That wasn't how I was relating to the instrument at all.

00:44:21.936 --> 00:44:23.416
Like, you know, what would a woman do on this?

00:44:23.898 --> 00:44:26.099
I was just crazy for that sound.

00:44:26.699 --> 00:44:30.322
I think people took me under their wing sometimes more because they didn't feel threatened.

00:44:31.003 --> 00:44:43.838
So There was an advantage that way in being a young girl and that people sometimes were protective of me or they were really glad to explain things at great length, which now is called mansplaining, but at the time it was really helpful.

00:44:45.659 --> 00:44:48.943
But there was some good information to be had and people were very free with that.

00:44:49.583 --> 00:44:55.570
And then maybe a little less pressure to fall in line with and compete with the guys that way.

00:44:55.590 --> 00:45:05.059
In other ways, it was a huge disadvantage in that a lot of the guys couldn't envision how having a woman in the band, so I would be bypassed for certain opportunities.

00:45:05.760 --> 00:45:12.807
But how it usually worked out was people who could see through that were the ones who would ask me to do things, and they were much more worth playing with.

00:45:13.309 --> 00:45:14.130
It could be tricky.

00:45:14.469 --> 00:45:19.456
There were a lot of encounters of meeting Junior Wills and not getting the same rap a guy would have gotten.

00:45:19.936 --> 00:45:22.639
But mostly people were kind and friendly to me.

00:45:23.159 --> 00:45:28.724
But I never tried to exploit it as a novelty, and I never felt that it would be being true to myself to do that.

00:45:28.806 --> 00:45:40.568
I think it would be a difficulty Because I'm not into the shtick as far as trying to sell femininity or sell female sexuality or something.

00:45:40.889 --> 00:45:46.961
I just really try to be myself up there and whatever mix of X and Y chromosomes has to be it.

00:45:47.329 --> 00:45:57.898
So talking about something else you've done is you've released a Blues Harmonica Blueprint, which are sort of interactive online lessons, some tuition material that you've re-released.

00:45:58.619 --> 00:46:03.463
Actually, believe it or not, Neil, has been 10 years since I released that, but it's still selling really well.

00:46:03.784 --> 00:46:11.351
It was the culmination of 20 years of teaching and about 10 years of really taking intense notes on my teaching to get to that point.

00:46:11.371 --> 00:46:17.275
I worked a lot on organizing it and I had a lot of thoughts about the way people learn and the way I learn.

00:46:17.295 --> 00:46:26.125
I'm a very discursive learner and I need to take things in from different modalities, thinking about how some people learn very technically and some people learn very intuitively.

00:46:26.164 --> 00:46:34.193
And I really wanted to find a way to speak to people, not have people feel left out or intimidated by the technical part.

00:46:34.554 --> 00:46:40.701
And I wanted to draw them into the rhythms that I learned from the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra and the sense of being part of the music.

00:46:41.061 --> 00:46:42.483
And you've done quite a lot of workshops.

00:46:42.782 --> 00:46:45.465
I think you've done some workshops with Paul Rochelle, haven't you?

00:46:45.847 --> 00:46:47.248
You did an online workshop.

00:46:47.248 --> 00:46:49.170
with Harmonica UK in 2020.

00:46:49.231 --> 00:46:51.994
I'll put the link on to the podcast page so people can check that out.

00:46:52.036 --> 00:46:56.742
You're talking a lot about tongue blocking and various techniques on there and also another one, Augusta Blues.

00:46:56.802 --> 00:46:59.027
So you've done quite a lot of workshops as well.

00:46:59.047 --> 00:47:00.409
It's something you do quite a lot teaching.

00:47:01.010 --> 00:47:01.469
Oh, yeah.

00:47:01.610 --> 00:47:08.501
It's been a big part of my musical life since, again, since I was 19 or so and I started just passing on what I knew at that time.

00:47:08.994 --> 00:47:10.594
I could never exclusively teach.

00:47:10.675 --> 00:47:14.298
I have to play in order to feel like I have something to teach.

00:47:14.619 --> 00:47:17.902
But teaching is definitely something I'm passionate about.

00:47:17.942 --> 00:47:26.768
During the beginning of COVID, when the Zoom thing wasn't quite up to the task of translating harmonica sounds, I just stopped for a while.

00:47:27.170 --> 00:47:32.034
And then the technology caught up, and I've just been getting back into giving private lessons on Zoom again.

00:47:32.054 --> 00:47:33.936
And that's actually been wonderful.

00:47:34.016 --> 00:47:36.557
I've been teaching students all over the world.

00:47:36.577 --> 00:47:39.780
I've been sitting in on some of Tomlin's harmonica seminars.

00:47:40.342 --> 00:47:42.545
I think I have another one coming up sometime soon.

00:47:42.585 --> 00:47:54.099
So it's been a nice way during all the shutdowns of the pandemic to reconnect with the harmonica community and find out that they're educators who are really helping to keep the community together.

00:47:54.119 --> 00:47:54.159
So

00:47:54.561 --> 00:48:03.012
a related question about this, we touched on this a little bit with practice earlier on, but if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

00:48:03.512 --> 00:48:31.746
When I play harmonica when i practice a lot of times what i'll do is i'll just pick a song out of the air whether it's a shuffle or a rumba or some little rhythm part and i'll just start playing a little rhythm like the way you drum your fingers on a table almost i'll just try doing that on harmonica a little back and forth blowing and drawing or if i hear a bass line i'll play a bass line so I'll start out by playing the rhythm part, and I might figure out what the bass line is to that rhythm part.

00:48:32.068 --> 00:48:33.831
These are not complicated songs.

00:48:34.052 --> 00:48:35.476
Oftentimes it's a one-chord jam.

00:48:36.097 --> 00:48:37.902
I'll start just breathing in rhythm.

00:48:38.210 --> 00:48:40.012
I can start embellishing on that.

00:48:40.271 --> 00:48:43.815
And once you have established a rhythm, you don't need to play it constantly.

00:48:44.135 --> 00:48:47.197
You loop that in your head and now you're accompanying yourself.

00:48:47.697 --> 00:48:54.063
Then from there, I might get an idea and I might stop and break it down and work on it if there's a tricky part or something like that.

00:48:54.483 --> 00:49:05.193
If there's a specific assignment to learn, say, a tricky part in a certain position, then I might need to just work on that till I get it, sing it to myself or tab it out.

00:49:05.454 --> 00:49:07.695
You really want to throw everything you can against the wall.

00:49:08.096 --> 00:49:09.677
It's So we'll

00:49:09.697 --> 00:49:11.298
move on to the last section now, Annie.

00:49:11.318 --> 00:49:13.280
We'll talk about gear to finish off.

00:49:13.382 --> 00:49:16.023
So first of all, what's your harmonica of choice?

00:49:16.844 --> 00:49:18.887
I'm still a diehard Marine band girl.

00:49:19.467 --> 00:49:24.253
After all these years, I started with the Pocket Pal and I graduated to Blues Harps.

00:49:24.512 --> 00:49:26.456
That was, I think, one of the recommended brands.

00:49:26.896 --> 00:49:28.998
The old Blues Harps, not the current Blues Harps.

00:49:29.498 --> 00:49:33.643
And then, of course, since Jerry played Marine bands, I had to play, I had to do whatever Jerry did.

00:49:33.722 --> 00:49:36.867
I was like a little Jerry's shadow for a couple of years there.

00:49:37.347 --> 00:49:38.128
So I started playing Marine bands.

00:49:38.128 --> 00:49:40.331
I like the deluxes.

00:49:40.992 --> 00:49:50.347
I have a couple of crossovers, but to me, even with all its flaws, the stock of marine bands still gives me the best middle range of tones and volume.

00:49:50.688 --> 00:49:54.934
Like on a deluxe, it's really hard to modulate your volume from low to high.

00:49:55.335 --> 00:49:58.079
It just kind of kicks up to high really fast.

00:49:58.519 --> 00:50:01.164
Marine bands, they fight back a little bit.

00:50:01.244 --> 00:50:05.070
They give you some resistance, and then they give you places to find a sweet spot.

00:50:05.378 --> 00:50:08.880
So that still works the best for me so far of the harps that I've tried.

00:50:09.181 --> 00:50:10.543
But I'm always open to trying new harps.

00:50:11.043 --> 00:50:11.884
And what about chromatics?

00:50:12.264 --> 00:50:14.427
I started with a Hohner Super 64X.

00:50:14.626 --> 00:50:18.650
I still have an old style one and I have a new style one that I'm still getting used to.

00:50:18.690 --> 00:50:20.773
I'm not a great chromatic player.

00:50:20.972 --> 00:50:24.396
I don't really spend the amount of time I would need to to be even a good player.

00:50:24.416 --> 00:50:26.478
I can pick a few things out on chromatic.

00:50:26.597 --> 00:50:28.800
And again, my idol is Charlie Layton.

00:50:28.860 --> 00:50:31.503
So if I ever wanted to sound like somebody, it would be him.

00:50:31.784 --> 00:50:34.186
And so you play 16 holes generally when you play?

00:50:34.530 --> 00:50:36.251
Yeah, that is just more comfortable.

00:50:36.271 --> 00:50:37.855
You have the range if you need it.

00:50:37.875 --> 00:50:38.235
Do

00:50:38.255 --> 00:50:40.778
you play any different tuned diatonics?

00:50:41.559 --> 00:50:45.425
Well, I started out playing a lot of different tunings of diatonics because I was learning to tune them.

00:50:45.684 --> 00:50:50.632
So I made my own major seventh harp and then I turned into a Frankenstein doctor.

00:50:50.672 --> 00:50:57.405
I would put a C blow plate and a D harmonica draw plate together and then just see what happened.

00:50:57.664 --> 00:51:00.487
And I made a harmonica that I tuned to play the autumn leaves.

00:51:00.547 --> 00:51:03.731
I was trying to get all the circle of fifths on one harmonica.

00:51:04.210 --> 00:51:06.313
It made an interesting little sound.

00:51:06.733 --> 00:51:09.496
But as a rule, I don't generally play them with Paul.

00:51:09.817 --> 00:51:18.746
With Paul, it's almost straight down the line, cross harp and some first position and occasional third position and some chromatic.

00:51:18.806 --> 00:51:22.210
And sometimes with Paul, the first song I played with Paul on chromatic was...

00:51:22.690 --> 00:51:34.105
Tears by Django Reinhardt on the Move Into The Country album.

00:51:42.596 --> 00:51:43.978
And what about overblows?

00:51:44.018 --> 00:51:44.778
Do you use those?

00:51:46.320 --> 00:51:46.422
I...

00:51:47.137 --> 00:52:10.005
can occasionally make an overblow but no i've almost never been able to use those on on a gig i've tried but i've really felt like there's so much i can get out of just the 36 notes you can get with bending without treading in that territory if i could i would but it's it's hard to go there i'd rather play those intervals on chromatic if i was going to play them

00:52:10.344 --> 00:52:23.362
yeah but uh i mean you talk about obviously you did lots of tuning when you were doing that work with magic dicks harmonica company so is that something you still do you still do lots of tinkering and make sure your harps are well set up and nice in tune do you spend the time doing that

00:52:24.204 --> 00:52:46.420
no i haven't in years i haven't really had a good setup to do that or nor the time but it was a good part of my background on learning about the works of the harmonica but ultimately i would just carry around an exacto knife and occasionally shave a reed a little bit to get it in tune and once i got an endorsement deal with honer i was able to get more new out of the box harmonicas.

00:52:46.460 --> 00:52:50.025
And then I, that made it a lot easier to just have working instruments.

00:52:51.068 --> 00:52:56.635
And also I had to give back my strobo tuner that I, that Dick and Pierre had bought for me.

00:52:57.077 --> 00:52:57.878
They needed it back.

00:52:57.938 --> 00:53:03.346
And so once I didn't have a strobo tuner, it didn't seem worth it because that that's really what you need.

00:53:03.686 --> 00:53:09.755
I guess now you can get an electronic version of that and everything, but this was a solid state one from the sixties with the wheel that actually turned.

00:53:10.237 --> 00:53:10.797
It's a great thing.

00:53:11.041 --> 00:53:12.123
Yeah, yeah.

00:53:12.143 --> 00:53:14.407
And so embouchure-wise, you talked about tongue blocking.

00:53:14.447 --> 00:53:19.293
I think you initially did you pick, well, you've said already you picked tongue blocking up off Jerry Portnoy.

00:53:19.313 --> 00:53:21.898
So you're a committed tongue blocker, are you, these days?

00:53:22.998 --> 00:53:23.659
It's always been.

00:53:23.699 --> 00:53:32.954
Since the time that I figured out what tongue blocking was all about, how it improved your tone and everything, I was always trying to sound like Jerry for the first couple of years.

00:53:32.994 --> 00:53:38.481
So I ended up overdoing it a little bit and tongue blocking everything and then learning to back off that.

00:53:38.914 --> 00:53:42.940
And then the next time I ran into Jerry somewhere, he said, I'm just rediscovering puckering.

00:53:43.481 --> 00:53:43.822
Damn.

00:53:45.764 --> 00:53:49.329
I have to go back and relearn everything now because Jerry's puckering again.

00:53:50.271 --> 00:53:52.956
So I would say probably about 70% to 80% of the time.

00:53:53.577 --> 00:53:59.206
But it's much more important to get to the note on time, sounding the way you want to sound.

00:53:59.385 --> 00:54:07.018
And whatever you have to do to do that, there are a lot of things that go through your mind as you're matriculating these little sounds.

00:54:07.425 --> 00:54:09.789
What about gear-wise amplifiers?

00:54:09.849 --> 00:54:10.670
What do you like to use?

00:54:11.431 --> 00:54:13.315
I like small amplifiers.

00:54:13.775 --> 00:54:16.179
We haven't played with a band now in a long time.

00:54:16.278 --> 00:54:20.425
And I used to drag around a 410 Bassman or a Super Reverb in order to cut.

00:54:20.865 --> 00:54:23.831
But if you need to be that loud, then the band is probably too loud too.

00:54:24.411 --> 00:54:31.722
Now with Paul as a duo, when we play amplified, I've got a little Vibro Champ that I play with a 10-inch speaker.

00:54:31.762 --> 00:54:36.409
And the 10-inch speaker makes all the difference because the 8 in a regular Champ is a little small.

00:54:36.673 --> 00:54:39.077
it breaks up too easily and then it sounds tinny.

00:54:39.418 --> 00:54:41.181
So the 10-inch speaker is perfect.

00:54:41.722 --> 00:54:46.289
And then if we were playing with a band, I'd have to go to something bigger like a deluxe reverb or something.

00:54:46.608 --> 00:54:49.713
Yeah, and do you find you have to mic up the small arm?

00:54:49.873 --> 00:54:50.856
It depends on the room.

00:54:51.315 --> 00:54:55.021
In a lot of places, the amp is too loud already, even without micing it.

00:54:55.242 --> 00:55:01.592
We've played in places where we've had to put the amps on the side of the stage pointing towards us in order not to inflict them on the audience.

00:55:02.132 --> 00:55:05.297
We've played in places where the drummer had to be in a plexiglass cage

00:55:05.730 --> 00:55:06.891
And what about microphones?

00:55:07.733 --> 00:55:09.836
For playing acoustic harmonica?

00:55:10.137 --> 00:55:10.697
Well, both.

00:55:11.378 --> 00:55:12.159
Start with acoustic.

00:55:12.601 --> 00:55:15.925
Well, I just play through the vocal mic when we're playing that way.

00:55:16.005 --> 00:55:19.992
So I usually follow shape mic like a Shure SM58.

00:55:20.213 --> 00:55:22.797
That's a pretty natural feel for me.

00:55:22.996 --> 00:55:28.326
Sometimes we go somewhere and the sound man brings up these special mics and says, hey, I brought this because I thought it would sound good for that.

00:55:28.577 --> 00:55:29.478
I can't really tell.

00:55:29.498 --> 00:55:33.144
It seems to me that the kind of crappy mic is just fine.

00:55:33.184 --> 00:55:36.949
And then more velvety studio mics and everything.

00:55:37.731 --> 00:55:39.534
I leave that to the sound guys to figure out.

00:55:39.653 --> 00:55:42.679
I don't have anything that is more dependable than an SM58.

00:55:43.500 --> 00:55:48.507
And sometimes a Beta 57 is nice if you're going to hold a microphone, especially with a band.

00:55:48.588 --> 00:55:55.157
If you need to actually cup the mic and you don't have a harp mic with you, then a Beta 57 gives you a pretty nice sound.

00:55:55.737 --> 00:55:58.181
Again, it's all about making a sound.

00:55:58.465 --> 00:56:06.057
The notes and things, you have to learn the notes to be able to have the tools, but you need to use those tools to tell a story.

00:56:06.097 --> 00:56:09.903
And there's a particular sound that goes with this kind of music.

00:56:10.485 --> 00:56:13.248
And there's certain stories that are told through the music.

00:56:13.289 --> 00:56:18.476
So it's your own story, but there's also a universal story and there's a very specific story.

00:56:18.518 --> 00:56:26.309
I'm sorry, I'm getting away from the technical part of it a little bit here, but whatever the mic is, it's really about the sound you make in your body.

00:56:26.530 --> 00:56:29.655
And the microphone is just amplifying that, hopefully not getting in the way.

00:56:29.934 --> 00:56:32.038
And what about when you're playing more of an amp sound?

00:56:32.057 --> 00:56:34.422
Do you use any particular mics for that?

00:56:35.182 --> 00:56:37.085
For years, I've been playing an Astatic 200.

00:56:38.068 --> 00:56:39.590
Sometimes I'd find them in antique stores.

00:56:39.610 --> 00:56:41.132
I always send them right to Dennis Gruenling.

00:56:41.572 --> 00:56:42.233
He knows what to do.

00:56:42.735 --> 00:56:46.039
So a crystal element Astatic is really my mic of choice.

00:56:46.059 --> 00:56:47.382
I started with a Green Bullet.

00:56:48.163 --> 00:56:54.666
And a Green Bullet has a really intense sound, but sometimes you don't want to be intense like that.

00:56:54.925 --> 00:57:00.431
Sometimes you want to have some nuance and I love the milky sound of good crystal mic.

00:57:01.072 --> 00:57:02.512
And do you use any effects

00:57:03.373 --> 00:57:03.494
at all?

00:57:03.514 --> 00:57:08.539
I use a reverb pedal if I have an amp without reverb and it has a little delay in it too.

00:57:08.579 --> 00:57:19.489
It's actually, again, a Jerry recommendation, a Boss RV3, which is obsolete, but you can get an RV5 and an RV whatever and put them together and get reverb and delay.

00:57:19.842 --> 00:57:26.150
When we recorded I Want You to Know, I played through an Echoplex for the first time and that became a studio mainstay.

00:57:26.230 --> 00:57:28.873
I love the sound of an old tape Echoplex.

00:57:29.494 --> 00:57:30.414
Final question then.

00:57:30.514 --> 00:57:36.242
So just about your future plans, what have you got planned gig-wise, any more albums and things like that?

00:57:37.684 --> 00:57:41.648
Paul and I are back in the studio occasionally trying to remember who we are.

00:57:41.668 --> 00:57:48.617
We had a couple of years off and I think when I don't have work, I'm not really here, not really alive.

00:57:48.637 --> 00:57:58.510
So I've been I've been doing things with music, but it's not the same relationship if you don't have a gig to get ready for and go to and the moment of connecting with the audience and all that.

00:57:58.891 --> 00:57:59.112
We've

00:57:59.492 --> 00:58:04.460
started playing out again, and that's very helpful and helps inform what we're doing in the studio.

00:58:05.141 --> 00:58:10.509
So far, we're just recording acoustic songs, recording more old songs, old country blues.

00:58:11.009 --> 00:58:16.297
But we always have ideas of other songs and other kinds of music that might end up on a project.

00:58:16.697 --> 00:58:19.322
So thanks so much for joining me today, Annie Rains.

00:58:19.713 --> 00:58:20.614
Oh, thank you, Neil.

00:58:20.635 --> 00:58:24.902
It was really fun talking with you and took me down memory lane and back again.

00:58:25.322 --> 00:58:27.887
Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast.

00:58:28.166 --> 00:58:38.041
Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas.

00:58:39.324 --> 00:58:43.791
Thanks to Annie for joining me today, really flying the flag for female harp players.

00:58:44.472 --> 00:58:45.353
Let's see more of them.

00:58:46.306 --> 00:58:53.355
Also thanks to Clemens Zorn for the donation to the podcast and also for his helpful suggestions about the podcast.

00:58:53.815 --> 00:58:58.802
If people have suggestions, then please email me on happyhourharmonicapodcast at gmail.com.

00:58:59.902 --> 00:59:01.885
I'll sign out now with Annie playing a live

00:59:01.945 --> 00:59:08.152
version

00:59:08.172 --> 00:59:08.474
of Looking Good.

00:59:08.494 --> 00:59:08.733
Looking Good.

00:59:11.362 --> 00:59:28.510
Thank you.

00:59:29.186 --> 00:59:47.005
Thank you.