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Giving It All Away: Blues Harmonica Education in the Digital Age
137,000 DISCRETE USERS
My primary means of employment for the past two decades—my day gig, in musician-speak—is teaching English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. I’ve written a handful of blues-focused books over the years, including a couple of academic monographs, a memoir, and a novel. But I’ve also been a blues harmonica player for more than forty years, and my life in and around blues music has taken many forms. I’ve been a busker in Europe and America, including four years on the streets of Harlem, and I still play the occasional street fair. Like every journeyman, I’ve played countless concerts, club dates, and restaurant gigs, plus dozens of festivals from New Orleans to Neuchâtel. I’ve taught blues harmonica in a range of settings, from private lessons and small group classes to lecture-style workshops and jam camps, and I’ve organized and produced a Mississippi-based event, Hill Country Harmonica. I’ve recorded ten albums, both duo and solo projects, and produced half of them, along with the debut by a young African American harmonica player from Memphis whom I’ll be talking about later.
Yet in terms of global impact, my various investments in the blues are dwarfed by what happened when, more than decade ago and quite by accident, I decided to take my blues harmonica teaching ministry into the world of digital media. Back in February 2007, when YouTube was still a wild and commercial-free frontier, I decided to upload a video with the title “Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed (Gussow.000),” in which I proclaimed my intention to “give it all away”—every last bit of carefully guarded esoteric knowledge and spiritual guidance I could muster. On the digital end I was an utter novice. I had no idea how wireless networks worked; my wife and I didn’t even have internet access, much less a router. But when I stood outside my rental house in Oxford, Mississippi, with my new MacBook, I was able to find something named Belkin hovering obscurely over the power lines, and when I pressed YouTube’s upload button and waited for ten or fifteen minutes, I suddenly had a video on YouTube. One video led to more—forty videos in forty days, a deluge that seemed to delight the rapidly accumulating subscribers to my Dirty-South Blues Harp Channel as much as it surprised me—and the videos kept on coming. That was the beginning of my long and implausible voyage as a digital-age blues harmonica educator and web entrepreneur.
More than 500 videos later, my YouTube channel has 20 million views and 70,000 subscribers. But YouTube and the roughly 100,000 monthly hits it delivers to my videos is only half the story: the free half, so to speak, since none of those views makes me a cent. I used too many copyrighted blues recordings early on, showing my subscribers how to copy cool licks, and have, in YouTube administrative parlance, been “disabled from monetization.”1 If you search the phrase “blues harmonica” on Google, you’ll find a website that I created back in April 2007, ModernBluesHarmonica.com, hovering somewhere on the first several pages. According to Google Analytics, Modern Blues Harmonica, in calendar year 2018, had 137,000 discrete users (i.e., individual visitors) and more than 750,000 page views from 192 different countries and territories around the world, including 35 of the 54 countries in Africa. The website makes a little money, although not as much as a competent full-timer would surely extract. I sell blues harmonica video lessons for $5 and my own hand-drawn tablature sheets—simplified musical notation—for $2. My prices have remained unchanged since 2007. Giving it all away on YouTube exists side by side with extracting a modest profit: the creed of the journeyman musician and small-scale entrepreneur. Composing hand-drawn tab sheets is time-consuming work. Often my tabs consist of twelve or twenty-four bars’ worth of a harmonica solo by one of the black or white greats—Big Walter Horton, Junior Wells, Paul Butterfield, Kim Wilson—that I’ve painstakingly pulled off a recording and notated. Sometimes my tabs consist of beginners’ songs of my own invention, with introductory melodies designed to usher raw beginners through the door. As web-based businesses go, Modern Blues Harmonica is a quirky, creaky, one-off little operation with information-stuffed pages that look ten years out of date and are drastically in need of redesign.
I haven’t written about my life as a digital-age blues harmonica teacher before now, perhaps because the spirit of market-focused entrepreneurship that undergirds the profit-accruing half of it seems jarringly at odds with the reflective, service-oriented creed that drives my work as a university-based intellectual. But there is a way, I think, of bringing those two worlds together: by investigating blues harmonica education as both a practice and an ideological investment; as something that teachers and students “do,” in a range of ways, but also as a business enterprise that might be interrogated on racial grounds.
Who am I, as a white man, to profit from the blues with the help of digital technologies? As Gil Scott-Heron might say, that particular scenario ain’t no new thing—and yet it is a new thing, this teaching of blues harmonica on a global scale through the medium of free YouTube videos and low-cost downloadable videos and tabs. I have students in every corner of the world, men (and a few women) I’ve never met who claim me as their teacher and copy my video improvisations with a skill that astonishes me: KomsonBlues in Hainan, China, or Predrag Antic from Bosnia-Herzegovina.2 Yet it’s worth noting, again, that what I’m dispersing and profiting from isn’t “black music” in any straightforward sense but a polyglot jumble of melodies drawn from the past sixty years’ worth of blues harmonica history, a black-and-white pantheon that I’ve transcribed, adapted, and supplemented with my own inventions. The experiment I’m conducting is radical and open-ended, one in which I’ve been joined by a gaggle of other internet blues harp teachers from around the world, and none of us has any idea what its long-term effects will be. This seems like a good moment to take stock of the near-term effects. In particular, I’d like to think critically about how people used to learn blues harmonica and how that process has been changed by digital technologies.
The broader sociological context for this change is of course the widely noted whitening of the mainstream blues world over the past sixty years. Interviewed by Newsweek in 1969 about his recent performance at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, B. B. King expressed astonishment at the rapidity of the change. “The last time we played there it was 95% black in 1963,” he said. “This time it was 95% white. I was shocked.”3 But King was also delighted—moved to tears, in fact—by the embrace of this new audience.4 Even as black youth abandoned the blues for soul music during the 1960s, younger white blues musicians, including harmonica players Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, were suddenly making their presence felt, and white audiences, for the most part, were happy to embrace that whiter shade of blues with the same ardor they brought to the black originals. At this point, in the second decade of the new millennium, one can find local blues scenes, complete with musicians, audiences, and jam sessions, in almost every corner of the world. (Google “Vietnam blues club” and you’ll find the Facebook page for an affinity group called the NOLA Blues Club Saigon, with news of an upcoming live show featuring the BBQ Blues Band at Snap Cafe in Ho Chi Minh City.) Blues has been transformed in the last half century from what had for many decades been primarily a black folk and popular music into a global subculture. In purely numerical terms, African American blues audiences and musicians have been swamped by a mongrel sea of blues-playing, blues-loving, non–African American others.
By uploading free lessons to YouTube and selling videos and tabs off my website for the past decade, I’ve helped further this development. Like their Black Arts brethren of another era, some contemporary African American blues musicians are alarmed by the continuing expansion of blues music’s audiences, the increasing heterogeneity of its performing cohort, and the loss of black cultural stewardship that this process represents. Such change is a threat, as they see it, to the core values of the blues, a threat grounded in the erasure of the very history—painful, suffered-for black history—that helped bring the music into being. Sugar Blue’s statement at the 2012 conference on “Race, Gender, and the Blues” at Dominican University, a Chicago-area hotbed of black intellectual resistance to the music’s appropriation, remains a touchstone for this point of view. “This is a part of my heritage in which I have great pride,” he proclaimed, invoking the blood-debt he owed to enslaved ancestors who had suffered the scourge of whips, guns, knives, chains, and branding irons. “You cannot and will not take this music, this tradition, this bequest, this cry of freedom and dignity from bloodied, unbowed heads without a struggle.”5 In a subsequent statement to journalist Howard Reich, Blue slightly softened his pushback, making a space for passionate white investments in much the same way Larry Neal had, even as he reiterated his warning against those who would decontextualize and/or claim ownership of the music:
There are a lot of people that love the blues but know little about its origins and have no concept as to how closely it is tied to the black experience. … The fact that it has become universal is a wonderful thing, because it says how important and influential and powerful this music is. But it must be remembered that though you are welcome to the house, do not try and take the home. Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you’re in.6
Blue’s statement encapsulates the paradox of our contemporary moment: a moment when a sense of black community ownership of the blues, blues as a vital ancestral inheritance, is in tension with the music’s global spread, its use-extension into countless non–African American communities that are in the process of mastering the music as best they can and making it a part of their own developing cultural inheritance. Should we celebrate this change, or condemn it? Should we embrace the postmodern globalization of the blues as a kind of progress, a victory for blues music as a cultural form, or critique that global spread as a crisis of cultural expropriation and dilution, a tragic erasure of the burdens and meanings of black history as lived by the music’s originators and encoded into the very fabric of the music?7
MASTERS AND APPRENTICES
One way of beginning to answer that question, I suggest, is to pay close attention to the way blues harmonica education has changed over the years. Here I hope to sidestep ideological disagreements by swerving toward lived experience and the specifics of knowledge transmission. Both my scholarship in blues autobiography and my own musician’s life convince me that there is what might be called an old-school process of blues education, one best expressed by analogy with the skilled trades. There are apprentices, journeymen, and masters. The young blues wannabe, of whatever age, seeks out a master and says “Teach me.” Or, alternately, the master identifies the promising apprentice and says, “I can teach you.” Ideally, both things happen in a dance of mutual convenience and the apprentice’s education commences. This old-school model, which held sway for many years in the predigital world and still carries significant force in our own day, was both grounded and local: learning depended on face-to-face, fully embodied encounters between master and apprentice, and such partnerships were generally struck up in specific locations on the blues highway where talent, old and young, tended to gather, especially towns and cities with active blues scenes like New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and Clarksdale, Mississippi. In some cases the master and apprentice set off together on the road, the older musician guiding the younger musician, showing him the ropes and profiting from his presence as a sideman. The word “protégé´” means “protected.” The protégé is the protected one who flies under the master’s wing. Eventually, at some critical moment of arrival, the apprentice becomes a journeyman and is certified by his master and the public as such. Not yet a master but no longer an apprentice, the journeyman blues performer realizes, knows, that he is capable of lighting out on his own.
I’m using a masculinist vocabulary here because the world of blues-playing men is the world I know, but the educational process I’m describing can be applied to female performers as well; Bessie Smith’s approach to the blues, for example, was profoundly shaped by the time she spent touring in a tent show with the older Ma Rainey. If we move back beyond 1960 into a black southern blues world before the dawn of “white blues” and its attendant dilemmas, we find a mentoring process that proceeded unevenly, sometimes harshly. Guitarist Big Joe Williams took on Honeyboy Edwards as his apprentice in 1929—“Joe was the first man that learned me how to hustle on the road,” Honeyboy told an interviewer—and the two men spent a profitable nine months traveling down through Mississippi to New Orleans. But “Joe started drinking heavy in New Orleans,” Honeyboy remembered. “I was young, I didn’t weigh but 110 pounds, and Joe started wanting to fight me. So I slipped off and left there walking.”8 Later, standing on a bridge in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and entertaining passersby, Honeyboy discovers that he can make money playing solo guitar, without Joe, and becomes a journeyman in that moment. Although Honeyboy’s blues apprenticeship involves a certain amount of formal musical instruction—the partnership begins, in fact, when Big Joe first watches young Honeyboy play guitar and says, “I can learn you”—the education process is as much about how to work the music, how to travel with it and make money with it, as it is about how to play it.
This is old-school, hands-on blues education. Honeyboy’s bumpy but fruitful apprenticeship is a gentleman’s handshake, however, compared with that of harmonica player Junior Wells, who described to an interviewer the brutal way Sonny Boy Williamson taught him about the blues when he was an ambitious tween in the mid-1940s:
I had asked him about teachin’ me somethin’ and he say, “Where’s your harp at?” I took it out and showed it to him. He took it and throwed it on the ground and stomped it. He said, “That’s not a harmonica.” He said, “You gotta go get one. And you gotta buy me a drink.” I say, “Okay.” So I went up there to the drugstore and I got me a Marine Band and I come back and I brought him back a half pint of whiskey. 100 proof Granddaddy. He said, “No. What do I look like to you? Some little boy or something’ another?” And I said, “No.” He say, “I need a fifth.” I went and got that fifth and brought it back to him. And he took the drink of it, big drink of it. Drink him some more and he sat down and went to blowin’ the harp. He said, “Now, I want you to listen to this.” So he blowed it and I tried to play it. He said, “You know what?” I say, “What?” He said, “Now, I’m gonna show you one more time.” And he did. And I did the same thing. He said, “You know what? You ain’t never gonna learn how to be nothin’ or do nothing’ with your dumb ass. And you know what else? You see that bottle of whiskey you bought?” He say, “You bought it, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And he say, “And it’s mine.” And he took his knife out and licked it and laid it down there by his bottle of whiskey, said, “And if you touch it, you little bastard, you, I’ll cut your damn throat. Now get up and get the hell away from me.”
Man, nothin’ ever hurt me before like that before in my life. I told him, “You just doin’ this to me ’cause I’m a kid, but if I was a grown man you wouldn’t do that to me.” He said, “Well, I did it. Now get out of my face.” I cried, that hurt me to my SOUL. I said, Lord Jesus. And, ah-oooh, man, I was more determined then I was gonna do it.
Wells headed north to Chicago and pursued his education with a vengeance on the streets and in the clubs. One evening a few years later, Sonny Boy showed up at a Blue Monday jam at Theresa’s Lounge and offered to buy Wells a drink. Wells was furious:
I said, “Let me tell you one thing. Don’t mess with me. Just leave me ALONE.” He said, “I know what’s wrong with you. You mad with me about what I said to you and the way I treated you a long time ago, right?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, listen at you now. You learned how to play. And you’re doin’ it right. I’m proud of you.” Said, “Now just think. If I had a’ babied you around you still wouldn’t be blowin’ the harmonica. Do that make sense to you?”
And I’ll be damned, it just run through my head just like that, said boom! He’s right. I said, “You’re right.” He said, “Well, come on and have a drink then. Now treat the next son of a bitch that come up and tell you to show him something, treat ’em like I treated you. [Laughs] The dumb son of a bitch’ll learn somethin’ then.” I was proud of him then, you know. ’Cause he was right about it. I probably wouldn’ta.9
There’s no love lost early on between the young blues wannabe and the older bluesman, and yet blues education does take place—inspired mentoring, one might even say, although others might call it the cruelest sort of hazing. Regardless, a musical and spiritual lineage is created. At the appropriate moment, face-to-face, Sonny Boy anoints Junior not just as a journeyman but also as his successor, someone who, in some appropriate future moment, will rough up, bluesify, his own young and naive apprentice.
What happens to this old-school model of blues education in the 1960s and ’70s? One thing that happens is that young white blues players begin to show up in black blues scenes that are themselves in the process of adapting to an influx of white blues fans, and black blues elders, for a range of reasons, begin taking on these young white men as apprentices. Many of today’s white blues elders, players like Rick Estrin, Steve Guyger, and James Harman, Charlie Musselwhite, Paul Oscher, Rod Piazza, and Kim Wilson, had transracial mentoring relationships of this sort with blues harmonica players like George “Harmonica” Smith and guitarist/bandleaders like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rogers. As with the previous generation of black harmonica players, locale critically inflects the mentoring process: blues-rich cities like Chicago and Memphis remain vital centers of blues harp activity, but Los Angeles becomes a staging area because Smith relocates there—Piazza and the late William Clarke, his protégé, gigged frequently with him—and Austin enters the picture thanks to one particular blues club, Antone’s, founded in 1975, which gives Wilson, harpist in the house band, the chance to back up his mentors Muddy and Jimmy in the course of extended residencies. “To have all those guys that you listened to on records all those years while you were playing, for them to treat you like an equal,” Wilson has said, “that’s success. I really think I’m one of them. In fact, I know I’m one of them. … They made me one of them. I can never pay them back for what they did for me.”10
What we hear in Wilson’s words isn’t just a sense of earned pride in his accomplishment and gratitude for the lessons he’s been taught by his African American heroes and mentors but also something like a heritage claim: a white bluesman’s insistence that his transracial mentorship has culturally blackened him in a way that secures him a spot in the grand lineage of blues harmonica. Black history isn’t something Wilson is making a claim on; in that respect, his heritage claim is quite different from that of his black peer, Sugar Blue. He’s making a claim based on lived and earned proximity to blackness, rather than on lived blackness, and on a wealth of shared experience on and off the bandstand: a history of interracial fraternity among blues musicians made possible by the transformations wrought by the civil rights struggle. Wilson’s blues harmonica education, as he understands it, is anchored in the ethos put forward by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: a “solidarity of the human family” which recognizes that “we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”11 Wilson’s transracial apprenticeship carries the integrationist spirit of the 1960s forward into the ’70s and beyond. In this respect it is markedly different from the fierce, in-group hazing that Junior Wells received at the hands of Sonny Boy. Cultural knowledge is still being transmitted face to face in this brave new blues world, older men are still mentoring younger men into the blues life, blackness is still pressingly relevant, but it’s a kinder and gentler educational process all around. (A black bluesist might respond, of course, that an older black man like Muddy Waters would have been reflexively disinclined to slap around a younger white man, in Chicago or elsewhere, thanks to the prohibitive penalties that accrued to such behavior in the segregated South, where he’d been born and raised.)
Kim Wilson and Muddy Waters
(courtesy of the photographer, Kathy Murray)
BLUES HARP AND THE NEW OLD SCHOOL
I’m seven years younger than Kim Wilson. In blues harmonica generational and educational terms, we’re a world apart. When I bought my first harmonica in 1974 at the age of sixteen, a white kid from the suburbs of New York City, I knew nobody else who played—nobody except Magic Dick of the J. Geils Band, a Jewish guy with an Afro whose recorded harmonica stylings on an up-tempo instrumental called “Whammer Jammer” I was determined to decode and master. I had never been to a blues club, never heard or seen an actual blues musician. So I did what culturally challenged white guys across America did back then when they had a hankering to learn blues harmonica: I bought a copy of the coolest available instruction manual at the local mall, a book called Blues Harp (1965) by a tough-looking white guy named Tony “Little Sun” Glover. The shadowy, oddly framed cover photo showed the long dark fingers of a black man in a suit holding a harmonica to his lips. Glover’s voice on the page was gruff, knowing, a little edgy—the voice of a hipster, a disreputable Kerouackian uncle—and incredibly comforting because of that. On my very first day as a blues harmonica player, I had a mentor and guide. All the players Glover profiled were older black men, a pantheon of greats that would quickly become my own. All the songs he broke down into tablature were drawn from them.
Here, it now seems apparent, was the next stage in the evolution of blues harmonica education: blue-blackness at second hand, rendered as written text rather than living song, and in the voice of what we might now call a white Negro: a white guy who’d lived the life and earned his way deep inside the music, or seemed to have done so. The master/apprentice relationship I established with Glover’s book, although vividly real to my sixteen-year-old self, was disembodied and abstract: a second-order simulacrum of the onstage partnership Kim Wilson had enjoyed with Muddy Waters, and a third-order declension from the vicious hazing that Sonny Boy had given Junior Wells when Junior was my age. Glover couldn’t reach out of his book’s pages and slap me around—but his voice could reach out and make demands on me, hip me the finer points, and confuse me in a way that led me deeper into the mystery of the blues. “At first,” he advised me,
you’ll probably model your style after your favorite harpman, and try to sound as much like him as you can—and that’s cool, because you need a sound and technique to aim for. But you should look beyond that. Say that Sonny Terry is your man, and you’ve worked and practiced and sweated until you’ve come close to his sound—now you can sit back, take a deep breath and grin at yourself. You sound like Sonny. Now why not go the next step and sound like yourself?
After all, Sonny already sounds like Sonny—and he is Sonny. And you ain’t. But you’re something he’s not—and that’s you. You’ve got your own ideas, scenes and perceptions. Why not play your own sound? That’s one thing that nobody else can or will do for you.12
What I did with what Glover had given me was strictly up to me, as it was up to each of his book’s many readers. Blues Harp couldn’t take me all the way. But it was a start. Among other things, it pointed me toward the records I began to buy at my local mall, jam along with, and copy licks from: black players like Sonny Terry, James Cotton, and Little Walter but also other players—white guys—I found in the blues section, like Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite. My disembodied blues masters.
Still in print today, Glover’s Blues Harp established the paradigm for blues harmonica education as distance education as it currently manifests in digital media: a massive open online jumble of teaching videos offered primarily by white journeymen of various degrees of competence willing to share what they know with whomever cares to watch, often for free but sometimes for a modest fee. In terms of blues lineage, Glover is my white hipster daddy. When I inaugurated my YouTube ministry in 2007, declaring my intention to “give it all away,” I was working within the Gloverian tradition—except, of course, I was now the heir apparent to Tony Glover, not his youthful apprentice. And I wasn’t charging a cent.
How I went from apprentice to journeyman is its own unlikely story. Suffice it to say that ten years after I first picked up a harmonica and long after I’d given up my ambition of becoming a serious blues player, a personal crisis led me to plunge back into music, determined to master my instrument, unburden my heart, and make my mark as a performer. At that point, quite unexpectedly, I was given a chance to live out the old-school model of blues education thanks to the intervention of two older black men: Nat Riddles and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee.
I met Nat, six years my elder, on the streets of New York one night in the spring of 1985.13 He heard me wailing as I paced uptown on Amsterdam Avenue, then swung his cab into a U-turn and yelled at me out the passenger window, grinning as though we already knew each other. A generous, thoughtful, and singularly charismatic man, Bronx-born, who told tales of Sugar Blue’s epic one-man street performances and Kim Wilson’s dazzling stagecraft, Nat was, from my star-struck perspective, the embodiment of blues harmonica tradition. The sounds he produced were strident, swinging, complexly layered; they were like nothing I’d heard up close, filled with nuances I’d never encountered on the records I owned. Nat pointed me toward John Lee Williamson—the first Sonny Boy, not the second—and demanded that I learn Big Walter Horton; I’d somehow managed to bypass both players, even though they appeared in Glover’s book. I took several sit-down lessons with Nat, then chased him down outside an East Village blues bar called Dan Lynch one afternoon and played him what I’d learned as he drank from a brown-bagged forty-ounce malt liquor. Lynch’s was his home base, the place where he gigged and hung out. That locale, with its endless Sunday jam sessions and glad-handing interracial fraternity, now became my second home as well. Nat worked the sidewalks of the Village that summer with his guitarman, Charlie Hilbert, as a duo he called “El Café Street”; he made me sit in, applauded my efforts, and certified my modest achievements with a bottle or two of Heineken. Then, at summer’s end, he disappeared. He’d been shot in the chest outside Lynch’s, people told me, after a lover’s spat or a drug deal gone bad.
Over the next six years, until he died of leukemia at age thirty-nine in 1991, Nat and I evolved from master and apprentice into friends. He not only transformed my blues harmonica playing, so that some of his distinctive sound worked its way into my own, but he made the blues real to me, offering me a living, breathing exemplar that no thumbed-through book or copied record possibly could. In part because his own friends, lovers, guitarmen, and harmonica heroes were white as well as black, Nat lived his blues ministry like a prophet of blues universalism, refusing the temptation to reify “black blues” and “white blues” in a hierarchy of authenticity or legitimacy; he just wasn’t interested in making those sorts of heritage claims. As he was fond of pointing out, several of his own teachers, Bob Shatkin and Lenny Rabenovets, were Jewish guys from Brooklyn. He stole licks and techniques from everybody, without apology; he made the music into his own thing and demanded that I do the same. His willingness to share freely of his knowledge made him an ideal mentor; he laid the groundwork not just for my later decision to share my knowledge on YouTube but also for a specific mentoring role I would play in a young black harmonica player’s life. His periodic crises and disappearances, painful as they were, schooled me in the sense of loss that it is the job of the blues musician to confront and overcome.
Since I’ve written at length about my second blues master in a memoir called Mister Satan’s Apprentice and spoken earlier about how he schooled me in the blues ethos, the briefest of summaries will have to suffice. Sterling Magee, when I first encountered him on a Harlem sidewalk in 1986, was a gray-bearded fifty-year-old who played guitar, stomped on a hi-hat cymbal, and shouted the blues with intimidating ferocity. His name, bystanders told me, was Mister Satan. He called himself that; everybody called him that. Awed by his power and brilliance, determined to connect with him, I returned the next day with my harmonicas, microphone, and battery-powered amp. I sat in with him on a long jam and we drew a larger crowd as a duo than he’d drawn as a one-man band. From that moment on, as though fated, we were partners. Sterling was Mississippi-born and Florida-bred. Buoyant with Harlem spirit, he’d already lived a long and peripatetic life when I met him, one that involved several deceased wives and a nervous breakdown half a dozen years earlier that led him to renounce his birth name for his current name. He was on the upswing these days, as was I—I’d finished my first year of study with Nat—and we were, we both sensed, exactly what each of us had been looking for: a powerful and charismatic blues master in my case, an energetic and willing accomplice in his.
For the next four years we worked that same outdoor spot in Harlem, giving me a priceless opportunity, as Mister Satan’s protégé, to deepen my blues education with the help of a demonstrative black audience, including a circle of older men who brought fold-up chairs to our daily concerts and became the amen corner we could count on. In 1991, the year Robert Johnson’s reissue CD went platinum, Mister Satan and I suddenly got picked up by major management—the devil-at-the-crossroads thing made us an easy sell, apparently—and for the next seven years we were a national touring act and a Living Blues cover story, until Sterling had another breakdown and, like Nat, disappeared down South for a while.
What lessons can be drawn from this brief narrative of my own blues apprenticeship and the larger story of the evolution of blues education? I’ll offer three. First, the apprentice/journeyman/master model has managed to survive the marked whitening of the blues scene over the past fifty or sixty years, although the specific contours and texture of that culture transmission process have modulated as white apprentices have entered the picture. Second, as the relative number of African American blues elders diminishes, the apprenticeship model, if it is to survive in America and around the world, will find ways of expanding to encompass nonblack blues elders: men of a certain age who’ve lived the life and know the music, not just white guys but Japanese guys, Chicano guys, whomever the local subculture considers worthy—and women, too, like my friends Roxy Perry and the late Big Nancy Swarbrick, tough but nurturing harmonica-playing bandleaders who have been important mentors in the New York metro scene.
Third, precisely because blues music is an African American inheritance, and a vital one, the blues educational process will always value a teaching lineage that connects present-day students, white as well as black, with African American masters. My Jersey-born friend Deak Harp served his apprenticeship with James Cotton back in the 1990s—following him on the road for five years, hanging out backstage, living in his Chicago basement, then driving his van for another six years. Cotton’s huge tone is audible in everything Deak plays, but he’s got his own distinctive sound as well, a repetitive, groove-centered growl in which he doubles his harp lines on a homemade diddley-bow guitar. Now, as a contemporary (white) master relocated to Clarksdale, Mississippi, Deak has accumulated his own protégé, a young Indiana relocatee named Carson Diersing. Cotton finally passed away in 2017, but his lineage will continue in part thanks to people like Deak and Carson. Even as Corey Harris angrily denigrates white interlopers in his Blues Is Black Music! blog, even as he journeys to Mali in search of Ali Farka Touré and other African roots-music masters in whom to anchor his own ancestry, he is teaching blues guitar to all comers, white as well as black, on the video-centered distance-learning platform Sonic Junction, creating a new generation of blues players who will someday invoke him as a mentor. In racial and aesthetic terms, lines of descent within the contemporary blues educational world are more tangled than they’ve ever been. Whether or not that’s a good thing—and I sincerely believe that it is—it’s certainly a new thing: a distinctive feature of our postmodern musical moment.
Before discussing my own endeavors in web-based blues harmonica education, I should say a few words about three of my professional peers, a cohort that might be termed the “new old school.” All of them have websites through which they solicit gigs and sell CDs and other merchandise, but all of them also rely on the traditional model of fully embodied, face-to-face mentorship, often in group contexts. Billy Branch (b. 1951), a three-time Grammy nominee based in Chicago and a contemporary of Nat Riddles (b. 1952), is the best known and the only African American of the three. He, too, is in the lineage of James Cotton—and Big Walter and Junior Wells and Carey Bell; he learned firsthand from Chicago’s best—and he is eloquent testimony to the fact that the white guys, plentiful as they’ve been in recent decades, haven’t yet displaced their black peers from center stage in the cultural transmission process. Billy has been teaching blues in Chicago’s largely black public schools for almost forty years, passing along the tradition in that way, but his teaching ministry is ecumenical and international, extending to Europe, South America, Asia, and Mexico. “Branch has delivered his empowering curriculum to students all over the world,” proclaims his website, noting with an accompanying photo that “the Ford Foundation funded a 2 week [Blues in the Schools] program in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico to demonstrate the common legacy of African-American and African-Mexican cultural roots.” He has no equal as a player and teacher.
Yet Branch is, for all that, an exception to the general trend, which is that white men dominate the blues harmonica instructional market in our postmillennial era. David Barrett (b. 1973), a teacher, performer, and author based in San Jose, California, describes himself as “the world’s leading expert in blues harmonica education” and “the world’s most published author of blues harmonica lesson material,” and it’s hard to dispute those characterizations.14 Mentored by Gary Smith, a white Bay Area harmonica legend who was himself mentored by Charlie Musselwhite, Barrett can in turn take credit for mentoring one of today’s best young players of color, Mumbai native Aki Kumar (b. 1980). (I discuss Kumar’s unusual career arc in the final pages of Bar 12.) A longtime columnist for Blues Revue magazine and the e-zine harmonicasessions.com, Barrett founded Harmonica Masterclass in 1994, organizing a series of multi-pro-celebrity-player weekend workshops that drew up to 250 registrants at a time. By 2002 he had organized his teaching ministry into a full-blown School of the Blues, offering individual and group classes, and BluesHarmonica.com, a website launched in 1999 that aggregated and promoted his various activities, merchandise, and publications, including book/CD packages and videos such as Basic Blues Harmonica Method and Building Harmonica Technique.
Jon Gindick (b. 1948), ten years older than me, first achieved notoriety for a self-published book, Country & Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless (1984). A California native with a shambling, bear-hugging Big Lebowski persona, Gindick has published half a dozen other harmonica books since then and bills himself as “the best-selling music instruction author in the world.”15 In 2003 he pioneered the concept of harmonica jam camps, four- and five-day retreats costing roughly a thousand dollars in which coaches interact with campers in a range of individual, small-group, big-lecture, and performance settings. Between 2006 and 2009, I taught at ten of Gindick’s camps—St. Louis, Jacksonville, Virginia Beach, Dallas, then half a dozen in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he has purchased a refurbished sharecropper’s shack as a second home.
Jon has a gift for making anybody, of whatever age, sex, race, or talent level, feel brave enough to stand up at a jam session and wail their head off. Essentially he views the harmonica as a tool through which he can conduct workshops in personal empowerment. He hasn’t, to my knowledge, been mentored in the old-school way that Deak Harp, David Barrett, and, in an earlier generation, Kim Wilson and Rod Piazza were mentored—although Gindick did convince B. B. King to back him up on several songs in his 1987 instructional video, Country & Blues Harmonica for the Absolute Beginner. From my perspective and for all his virtues, he lacks grounding in the stylistic and attitudinal orientation of the African American blues tradition, at least as I came to know those things during my doubled apprenticeship.
But who am I to talk? Relative to Wilson, Piazza, and Barrett, I’m strictly a part-time lightweight. I never had the cool, stylish, greased-back, vaguely dangerous look that real blues harmonica pros were supposed to have, nor did I have the serious music-school training, including the ability to sight read, that enabled Barrett to write all his books. By temperament, I’m a modernist, not a traditionalist—the fruit of my years with Sterling, who took great pride in his originality and demanded that I do the same. Like Sterling, I wanted to kick the blues forward into a new place, not keep the music anchored in a white hipster’s dream of 1950s Chicago. It was for this reason, among others, that I made my move on YouTube. In some perverse, not-fully-thought-through way, I hoped that my promise to “give it all away” would break the clubhouse wide open, flood the inner sanctum with light, and rout the white traditionalists once and for all. But I also felt, more altruistically, that somebody had to serve the players of the future in an online context, sharing the fruits of their professional experience in the virtual world, and that just wasn’t happening.
BLUES HARMONICA SECRETS REVEALED
In February 2007, YouTube was a very different place than it is now. It was strictly noncommercial; the website’s terms of service insisted on that.16 Monetization—the incorporation or overlay of ads into videos—hadn’t yet been introduced. Where blues harmonica was concerned, it was more like a picked-over steam table than the world’s largest big-block video library. There were several dozen grainy videos of the African American greats—James Cotton, Sonny Boy Williamson, Carey Bell—and some vintage amp bench tests by a German player named Harpsucker. Gindick was there with his “Jamcamp06” channel, strumming guitar and tooting. Ronnie Shellist, an Austin-based journeyman, had uploaded a half-dozen jam-along-in-your-bedroom videos, including one called “Funky Blues Harmonica” that had 20,000 views then and has more than 2 million now. That was pretty much it.
So, stumbling blindly forward, powder-kegged with energy, I set up my Sony videocam, made a video, and uploaded it. By labeling it “Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed (Gussow.000),” I announced my disruptive intentions and committed myself to a course of action. I had no thought of financial gain and I was explicit about my guiding ethos, which I’d taken from Lewis Hyde’s 1983 classic, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. “A gift only lives if you give it away,” I announced in my thirty-eighth video, six weeks in.17 I had 792 subscribers by that point, and the comments and emails I’d received told me that I had indeed found my public. “The reason I’m giving you guys these lessons on YouTube,” I said, mentioning my maiden voyage as a sixteen-year-old with Tony Glover’s book, “is because I wish that I had had somebody who knew how to play, who knew how to teach, who had thought through and lived with this stuff for a long time, to come along to me when I was desperately searching for information, to give me his personality, to give me his knowledge, to give me whatever wisdom he’d learned in the course of his blues and life’s journey.” I mentioned how important Nat Riddles had been to my own development. I finished up by directing my subscribers toward a trio of good teaching websites: gindick.com, harmonicalessons.com, and bluesharmonica.com. Maybe Gindick and the others would make a few dollars from the mention. I was happy to help out.
Then, just as I’d reached equilibrium, everything broke open again. It started when my subscribers said, “We want to give you money. A tip, as thanks.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask for donations, but the busker in me was intrigued. I searched the terms “build website” and found Macwebsitebuilder.com, which offered an idiot-proof template and a ten-day free trial. I picked the first domain name that came to mind and managed to create a cheesy-looking homepage. I rented a P.O. Box and—because several overseas subscribers insisted on PayPal, something I’d never used—I signed up for the service and figured out how to put a “donate” icon on the homepage. Then, because YouTube’s terms of use forbade any sort of advertising or commercial use, I put on my ratty old busker’s hat and a bright red Hawaiian shirt and made a video in which I informed my subscribers, tongue in cheek, that I had just founded a new church, the Joyous Disciples of Blues Harmonica Anarchism, and would be happy to accept donations. I held up large-font signs on which I’d typed the relevant real and virtual addresses. I figured I’d take whatever trickled in, then kill the website before I got charged.
Over the next seven days, $700 worth of donations flooded in. My PayPal account suddenly resembled an international depository. Tens and twenties fluttered out of hand-addressed envelopes cluttering my new P.O. box, but most people preferred instant electronic largesse. I was floored. Giving it all away had led to this?
Then I had what felt like a staggering insight, although it seems trivially obvious now, more than a decade later, when ideas about the disruptive power of digital technologies and the dematerialization of books, movies, and recorded music have played themselves out on a grand scale. The old model of retail blues harmonica education back in 2007, if you didn’t have a local pro, was books, CDs, and DVDs. You put a $15 or $20 check in the mail, and somebody—a top pro like Jerry Portnoy, who played for Muddy—sends you back what you’ve ordered. The process takes a couple of weeks from the moment you act on your impulse. Suppose I took the hand-drawn tab sheets I’d developed over the two decades I’d been giving private lessons and created video tutorials that revolved around them, then found a way of uploading those videos and tabs to a file-hosting website, with links from my new website, so that people, for a modest PayPal charge, could instantly download them? Little Walter’s “Juke,” for example, or “Born in Chicago,” or Big Walter’s “Easy”? Plus “Same Old Blues,” “Bittersweet Boogie,” and all the beginners’ exercises I’d worked up for my students over the years. Virtual presence and low-priced digital files, one song at a time, cafeteria-style. No muss, no fuss.
If my insight was correct, if I was able to configure the various moving parts into something that actually worked, time and distance would be scrubbed for the first time from the blues harmonica educational delivery system and the book-and-instructional-CD model would be consigned to the dustbin of history.18 I was sure that somebody more tech-savvy than I had already figured this out—David Barrett at bluesharmonica.com, for example—but a half hour’s research revealed that nobody had. They’d barely figured out that YouTube was there. Any would-be blues harmonica student with internet access would be able to purchase and download my lessons instantly at any hour of the day or night, anywhere in the world. The old-school, face-to-face, long-form apprenticeship that I had served with Nat Riddles and Mister Satan was a great thing if you could find it, but most people couldn’t find it. They, too, deserved a chance to learn how to play blues harmonica.
That was the birth of modernbluesharmonica.com. I’m aware, even as I narrate this history, that what I’ve described could easily be caricatured as a baroque example of the “white thing” that Black Arts spokesperson Larry Neal wanted to destroy: white ideas and white ways of looking at the world that suck all the humanity, all the funk, out of a music that deserves better. Some may object that the dream of global domination that I’ve confessed to above, albeit in a playful, mock-epic voice, puts me into perilously close alignment with the bad actor Sugar Blue was referring to when he warned against those interlopers who would not only enter the “house” that is the African American blues tradition but also try to claim ownership. “Do not try and take the home,” he warns us. “Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you’re in.” It’s a nontrivial advisory, one that distills the core dilemma explored by this book. The house that is blues harmonica was indisputably built by African American men, and this is truer the further one goes back in time. But white men, too, have built additions to that house over the past half century—and quite a few of them were mentored by older black men. At what point does the white apprentice become a master in his own right, bringing honor to his black master by doing so? At what point does he truly enter the tradition, contribute something original to it, earn the right to speak on behalf of it? And where does this leave player/teachers like me—determined to share the gifts that have been bestowed on us, determined to keep the tradition alive and vital, pushing students around the world to embrace it and perhaps even leave their mark on it? Digital technologies exist; blues harmonica is a sound that people across the globe clearly hunger for. In spreading the gospel far and wide, as I have sought to do, have I taken something away from Sugar Blue, his living black blues brethren, the departed black masters we all revere? Or, in talking them up to my subscribers and customers, have I helped ensure that there’s a continuing audience for their work?
Or, despite my mentoring by two black elders and my academic training in African American literature and culture, am I perhaps distorting the meaning of the music—subtly, crucially, inevitably—by virtue of the fact that I do, after all, walk through the world as a white man? Yet even as I frame that question, my critical reflexes lead me to look askance at that phrase “the meaning of the blues.” Surely we all realize, in this late postmodern moment, that there is no one unitary “the” when speaking of the blues, unless you’re preaching fundamentalism. Meanings are contingent, if significantly inflected by social history. Shaped by dialogue and critique, sustained by community endorsement, they emerge from, and help guide, social practices. Lots of people other than African Americans have attached meanings to the blues over the past half century. Although some of them—sponsored by the Blues Brothers’ costumed burlesque, for example—are trivial, even demeaning, others are not so easily dismissed. In a review of Weeds Like Us (2019), an autobiography by (white) blues singer Janiva Magness, Mary Katherine Aldin writes,
Her childhood was one of nearly Gothic tragedy, including the suicides, separately, of both her parents, a succession of foster homes during her early adolescence, and her encounters with abuse, drugs, alcoholism, rape, and serious depression. A runaway at 14, a teenaged pregnancy ended with her surrendering her daughter for adoption; many of her siblings died too young (the body count in this story is unusually high) and she herself attempted suicide several times. … She writes “Blues is a lot more than my vocation. It’s been my salvation.”19
None of us, not even Willie Dixon, author of an autobiography titled I Am the Blues (1989), has the final word on what the blues mean, have meant, and can mean. Still, Dixon’s bold claim—“I am the blues”—is not one that I, or any white player I can imagine, would or could ever make. And that differential surely means something.
And what about money? How does profit-accrual factor into the social justice equation? I’ve invested not just time but brains and heart in learning how to play blues on my instrument and figuring out the most effective ways of teaching others how to do the same thing. Nobody has yet suggested that I was wrong or unethical to give my teaching away for free, although I suppose that argument could be made. Am I wrong, then, for seeking to profit from my teaching? Am I somehow misusing the blues when I, as a white man, do that? Or am I doing what people who play this music have always done: trying to scrounge some portion of a living with the help of whatever talent, industry, and originality they could muster? Honeyboy Edwards viewed the blues that way; so did Robert Johnson.
Even as I ask these questions, I’m aware that several younger generations of white players (and non–African American players more broadly) are coming up behind me who do not, in fact, see blackness as an essential constituent of the blues, either because they haven’t had black mentors and bandmates, or because they aren’t particularly conversant with the sociohistorical origins of the music and the feelings that underlie it, or both. I find this every bit as concerning as Sugar Blue does; here he and I suddenly find common ground. But what is to be done?
The realm of digital commerce, it turns out, offers several ways of addressing these problematics.
One of the best things about the sort of widely dispersed virtual communities enabled by the internet is that they give us a chance to create real embodied communities, if only briefly. This is why, in 2010, a partner and I cobbled together an event called Hill Country Harmonica, a long-weekend homecoming in north Mississippi for my YouTube and Modern Blues Harmonica students—I invited them via video uploads and posts on the MBH forum—that over the next three years featured contemporary masters like Billy Branch, Sugar Blue, Phil Wiggins, Charlie Sayles, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, and Robert “Feelgood” Potts, along with young guns like Aki Kumar, Andrew Alli, and Damion Pearson. As a promoter, I’ve sought to hire African American players, something that a fair number of contemporary blues festivals no longer seem to consider a priority. I do this out of admiration and respect: for the inspiring music they make, the values they carry, the vernacular traditions they embody. I invite them not just to come and headline the evening concerts but also to sit with us under the big gazebo on long lazy afternoons and allow me to interview them, sharing the lessons they were taught by their own teachers, reinventing the face-to-face mentorship for a new era.20 Not surprisingly, videos taken by registrants are freely shared on YouTube in the event’s annual aftermath, so that the embodied community has a long afterlife in cyberspace.
My own curatorial efforts as YouTube uploader and majordomo of modernbluesharmonica.com are part of this flowering of contemporary blues harmonica culture. Here, paradoxically, I use my position as (white) blues harmonica spokesperson to blend an all-comers ethos with a continuing emphasis on the blues as an African American cultural inheritance. As a way of quickly orienting students toward the tradition’s vital center, for example, my website offers a top-ten list of greatest all-time players; nine are African American, and Sugar Blue is on the list. (A cranky black bluesist might argue, of course, that nothing is whiter and less in the spirit of a cussed old soul like Sonny Boy Williamson than a top-ten list.) Several years ago, moved by Blue’s statement about how many fans and players “love the blues but know little about its origins and have no concept as to how closely it is tied to the black experience,” I created a sequence of twelve one-hour YouTube lectures under the heading “Blues Talk” in which I tried to address that lack, using my training as an African American literature scholar to talk about works by W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, and the black southern blues worlds they sought to evoke. This book, growing out of those lectures, is my considered response to Sugar Blue’s call.
BLUES MENTORSHIP RECONFIGURED
The final chapter of this story is the tale of how I met and mentored a young African American player from Memphis, and how we changed each other’s lives.
In February 2008, to celebrate my one-year anniversary on YouTube, I uploaded a performance video in which I showed myself playfully struggling to execute “Whammer Jammer,” the song that first led me to pick up a harmonica as a sixteen-year-old. Apart from my high school graduation, I’d never actually performed it live, but I’d been working on it for thirty-odd years and had it 99 percent right. The great majority of viewers offered praise in the comments section, but somebody with the handle “superchucker777” wrote something like “Actually, you’re playing that lick wrong.” Who the hell are you? I thought, intrigued.
I was more intrigued when, after a back-channel exchange, I discovered that he was a sixteen-year-old high school kid named Brandon Bailey who lived up in Memphis and was about to perform “Whammer Jammer” in the semifinals of the Orpheum Star Search competition. We spoke on the phone; he was extremely polite, almost nerdy, and refreshingly direct. His long-term career goal, he said, was pediatric oncology. He asked me to drive up from Oxford and watch him compete. Remembering how generous Nat had been to me, remembering my own hunger for guidance at Brandon’s age, I drove eighty miles up to Memphis on the appointed evening, found the concert hall at the foot of Beale Street, and slipped into a seat. He was well-dressed in a pinstriped suit and hat, one of twenty-five contestants. He was the only harmonica player. Most of the other contestants were singers of the professionally groomed, stage-mothered variety. His solo performance through a small amp was dynamic—he played the song properly, Nat would have said—but he didn’t move around much. Still, the solo harp thing was unique enough and his playing was strong enough that he made the cut and was passed along to the finals, one of eight who would perform six months later on the same stage.
I realized almost immediately that I had something to offer him: a lesson in stagecraft that an older man—an actor friend of my family’s—had given me when Satan and Adam were about to tour internationally for the first time back in 1991, opening for Bo Diddley on big stages in the United Kingdom. So a couple of months later I booked a rehearsal room in a Memphis studio and drove up again from Oxford. Brandon lived with his mother and grandmother in a garden apartment complex in South Memphis. “It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Gussow,” he said in his slow, formal way as we shook hands. His mother got into the back seat and we drove over to the studio and walked into the carpeted room, harmonica cases in hand. Then Brandon and I got to work. I asked him to sit with his mother in a pair of chairs along the wall while I stepped up onto the low stage and turned to face him. “In the semifinals,” I said, holding my arms wide, “you moved between here and here.” I walked the length of the small imaginary box I’d just outlined. “If you want to beat everybody in the finals, you need to use the whole space, including the corners. You need to own the stage.” He came up and stood where I’d stood and I walked out and sat where he’d been sitting, next to his mother. “Lift your head,” I called out. “Look out at us.” As he started to play, I remembered Nat’s words to me—his very first bit of guidance in our very first lesson, in fact. “Open your hands,” I urged. “Let it out.”
Half an hour later we were done. It was a warm June afternoon. We drove over to Beale Street, strolling and basking, eventually connecting with Vince Jackson, an African American bluesman who was working the outdoor stage in Handy Park with his band. Intrigued by Brandon’s youth, pleased to meet a pair of fellow harp players, Vince invited us to sit in. It was the first time Brandon had ever played with a blues band, or any band. Two weeks later, on the Fourth of July, Brandon and his mother drove down to Oxford and I had him sit in with Sterling Magee at a house party I’d organized to celebrate Satan and Adam’s official comeback tour after a decade’s absence. He fit right in. (The YouTube video is titled “Introducing Brandon Bailey (with Mister Satan).”)
Three months later my wife and I drove up to Memphis for the Orpheum Star Search finals. First prize was $5,000 and a recording contract. We sat in the front row. Brandon, now seventeen, would be competing against seven other seventeen-to-twenty-year-olds. All were white; at least half of them, according to the program, had won or placed highly in other talent competitions. They’d appeared at county fairs, starred in semipro productions of Broadway classics. One girl, a trained opera singer, had unbelievable power and vocal range. They’d had all the advantages. Several of them could easily have made the cut at American Idol and been sent to Hollywood.
Brandon was the last contestant of the night and the only one who didn’t sing. What chance did he have? He was backed up by the house band. He cued them with a finger the way Nat used to do—not a move I’d shown him—and hit the opening chord, then nailed the bent high note and started jamming. He strode into the floodlights as he worked the groove, pivoting side to side, keeping his head high. By the time the band fell in behind him, the crowd was clapping in time. And then, rocketing along through a half-dozen stop-time choruses, he came into his full power. He’d gone far beyond the couple of moves I’d shown him back in June. The stuff he’d figured out isn’t stuff you can teach. He owned the stage, the song. I stared up at him as he ended with a screaming bent high note—Magic Dick’s signature, and my own—followed by a thundering crash that dissolved into the roar of the crowd. He pulled his hands away from his face, allowed himself a small grin, and took a bow. I trotted up the aisle to the rest room, excited, as we waited for the judges’ tally. The event photographer, who’d been to the previous five finals, was shaking his head. “I’d pay to see that,” he said. “Me too,” I said. Nat would be proud, I thought. The announcement of the winner, when it came, was icing on the cake.
Brandon Bailey
(photograph by Tucker Walsh, courtesy of National Public Radio)
Brandon and I have remained friends; our real and virtual lives have continued to intersect in unexpected ways. The year after his Star Search triumph, as he was exploring a cutting-edge synthesis of harmonica playing and beat-boxing, he surprised me with a gift: the most basic of stomp-boxes, not much more than a small block of wood with a quarter-inch phone jack. That sent me off on a voyage of discovery as a one-man band, leading me within a year to record a solo harp-and-foot-drums debut, Kick and Stomp (2010). (The remake of “Crossroads Blues” has a shout-out to Sterling Magee; the music video, enlivened by an awkward dance move or two, has managed to accumulate 3 million views.) The following year, donating my services in exchange for the experience, I produced Brandon’s debut CD at Royal Sound, the same Memphis studio that turned out Al Green’s hits and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk.” That album, Memphis Grooves (2011), landed Brandon on NPR’s All Things Considered (“Harmonica Blues with a ‘Brand’ New Beat”) and briefly rose to #1 on the iTunes blues chart.21 One track, an instrumental arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” featured the two of us blasting out a long intertwined series of blues harp improvisations, all of them driven along by the foot drums that I’d never have ended up playing if a certain cocky sixteen-year-old hadn’t commented on my YouTube video three years earlier.22 Brandon was already light-years ahead of his Orpheum performance. Hard as he made me work to keep up, I was thrilled to hear echoes of my sound and approach in his, along with lots of stuff I couldn’t take credit for and had no desire to. The truth was, I’d never actually given him a formal, face-to-face harmonica lesson. We’d just hung out, jammed, and talked harp. He’d done the rest.