A Short Ode to the Harmonica

In some beautiful surviving footage from a 1990 live performance, Stevie Wonder swings his whole body beneath the aura of a sapphire blue light, perfectly in-step with the rhythm of his backing band. He captures the full attention of the crowd with his gem-studded suit and contagious smile, as he serenades them with “Isn’t She Lovely,” a song from his classic 1977 album Songs in the Key of Life. Around the half way through the performance, Wonder pulls out a 16-hole chromatic harmonica from his pocket and brings the instrument close to his lips, fingers softly folded over the outer plates. As he begins the ritual of directing air from his lungs into the chamber, it almost appears as though he is trying to start a small fire in his hands. He shuts his eyes tight and puts all his energy and breath into playing the soulful riff, and the crowd responds with a round of cheerful applause. Through this moment, I’m reminded that Stevie Wonder’s original claim-to-fame was in fact as a child harmonica prodigy – but even long after his transformation into a superstar in the popular music arena, he never abandoned the harmonica as a defining element in his music.

It may not be the instrument of choice for many musicians today, but the harmonica is certainly one of the most iconic instruments in popular American music history, featuring prominently in rock, jazz, country, folk, and of course, blues. From blues legend Muddy Waters to Americana luminary Bob Dylan, countless musicians have used prominent harmonica riffs to bring a certain “down-home” authenticity to their music, capitalizing on the instrument as both foreign and familiar to American audiences. Often called the “blues harp,” the harmonica is truly a people’s instrument.

Many first encounter the instrument through popular television, which has concocted and expedited mythology around the harmonica, giving it new narratives and expanding or heightening pre-existing ones. One of these, the

“jailhouse blues” trope, as I like to call it, comes about when a character is behind bars, reflecting on their past mistakes, playing the harmonica to pass the time and survive the drudgery of the slow and bleak life in a cell. Borrowing heavily from the old stereotype of the bluesy black prisoner, the harmonica has often been used as a narrative shortcut to tell the viewer something essential about the person playing it: they are sad. This sadness is not fleeting or shallow, but deeply spiritual, usually arising from a series of unfortunate events that put the musician in a state of both desperation and nihilism. Through the harmonica, a person can cry out to the world with a passion that surpasses mere human language in richness and clarity. Lonely cowboys, vagabonds, outlaws – in my mind, the harmonica was an instrument that belonged to these people, who in some cases had no other form of expression available to them, and no one who cared to listen to the stories they could tell.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact origins of the harmonica that we have today. Its lineage is quite ancient. Most historians acknowledge the Sheng – a Chinese mouth-blown free-reed instrument originally made of bamboo tubes and a gourd wind chamber – as an ancestor technology, dating to around 1100 BC. In 1780, Dutch physician Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein invented a freereed device that was meant to closely imitate human speech, in an attempt to study the human voice itself. In 19th-century Europe, several mouth-blown free-reed instruments similar in size and technique came into existence at around the same time, bearing greater resemblance to the harmonicas that we see today. The modern harmonica was first introduced to America in 1857, and was instantly popular among poor, classically-untrained musicians who wanted a simple way to play the ditties they knew and loved. Easily portable, affordable, and cheap to manufacture, the harmonica became an instant hit among Civil War soldiers, who entertained themselves during their free time by playing songs about war, homesickness, pain, and joy. In most cases, these early consumers of the harmonica couldn’t afford to buy any other instrument and didn’t have access to the training necessary to play them either. In fact, the mass purchase of the harmonica was a form of resistance; people were going to find a way to play music, even if they couldn’t afford to buy top-notch instruments and perform in the fancy venues in the big cities. The harmonica soon became a symbol of folk identification in a social climate dominated by bourgeoisie expression.

The harmonica is a free-reed wind instrument, meaning that it uses exhalation and/ or inhalation from the player as the force which vibrates small thin strips of brass (called reeds) hundreds or thousands of times per second inside tiny slots on the reed plate, producing a musical frequency quite shrill in essence. To play the harmonica, you pucker your lips and cover certain holes with your tongue, forming an airtight seal as you begin to breathe in. To add some wailing vibrato, you cup your free fingers over the backside chamber and vibrate your hand to direct the sound waves. The most common type of harmonica, the 10-hole diatonic, is actually limited to playing notes of just one specific scale, and so some melodies simply can’t be played naturally. But by rapidly adjusting embouchure (the shape and position of the mouth), master harmonicists are able to “bend” their pitches and create glissando effects that utilize a wider range of notes that otherwise would not be available to them. The need for this ingenuity is built into the design of the instrument.

In his praise for the harmonica, blues virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite said “the harmonica is the most voice-like instrument. You can make it wail, feel happy, or cry. It’s like singing the blues without words.” The versatile sound of the harmonica is rivaled by no other. When it is featured in popular music, it usually needs very little accompaniment. A popular instrument for solo breaks, no one really seeks to harmonize or sing in unison with a harmonica. Rather, musicians let the instrument take on a life of its own, charmed by its ability to touch audiences with its melismatic allure. The harmonica speaks in its own secret language, an untranslatable lexicon of emotions that seem to expand the limits of what humans are capable of expressing. Interspersed with groans, shouts, and gut-wrenching lyrics centered on loss and grief, the harmonica was the perfect solo instrument for blues musicians because of the social dimension that it could easily unveil — the lonely musician playing a simple instrument that he acquired for a small price, perhaps the only form of self-expression that could get across his unspeakable sorrow to listening ears.

More than any other instrument that I have ever heard, the harmonica reveals the underlying impulse driving our manipulation of instruments: to create an extension of the self, articulating and bending notes in ways that can’t be performed by human effort alone. This is a kind of longing that is common in the art that I love most. The harmonica is not the easiest instrument to master from a technical standpoint— tongue-blocking, lip pursing, and superb breath control are all necessary skills to truly excel. Nor is it the prettiest when you hear it for the first time—its unique, distorted-sounding timbre makes it hard to incorporate into the average pop song. But there is an intimate magic about the flashy gesticulation of blowing heavy wind into a tiny device while creating a miniature auditorium of sound with only your hands. In some ways, human expression is limited by the tragic fact that there is a finite amount of words available to translate an infinite amount of possible emotions and experiences. So we must improvise, using any sound-producing object that we can get our hands on, especially when we are down-and-out with little chance of being heard by the outside world. The harmonica reminds me of the intense labor that humans will undertake in order to push these limitations, or perhaps refine the ways in which we understand even our own capabilities. Though it may evermore be seen as a quaint relic of a long-past era of music, the harmonica holds a supreme reigning place at the heart of American culture, past and present.

Editor in Chief

Adrianna Bruisie

Editorial Director

Sriya Choppara

Creative Directors

Caroline Jones

Hana Stauss

Operations Director

Emre Guler

Finance Director

Greer Goergen

Marketing & Media Director

Deren Alanay

Website Manager

Erin Ma

Staff Writers

Noor Abbasi

Emre Guler

Sarah Kim

Cathy Li

Wes Matthews

Cindy Su

Editors

Noor Abbasi

Greer Goergen

Irma Kiss Barath

Wes Matthews

Melissa Murin

Jaahnvi Shastri

Graphic Designers

Maia Bazilian

Adrianna Brusie

Caroline Jones

Tyler Kleim

Erin Ma

Ani Nguyen Le

Emilie Slater

Mendel Socolovsky

Hana Stauss