About 500 harmonica players have descended onto the San Antonio River Walk for a convention with a single purpose: preserve and promote the fading use of harmonica in popular music. Harmonica ...

In the summer of 1963, a strange record by a 12-year-old boy who’d already racked up a string of flops spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It’s largely a showcase for that ...

Most nights, you can walk into a blues club and find a harmonica player blowing their heart out onstage. The wailing, honking sound associated with Western movies and juke joints is what many harp ...

“Classic Harmonica Blues,” out on May 21, features 20 tracks by the blues’ greatest harmonica players. Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings In the early 20th-century, southern black ...

A solace to Civil War soldiers and World War II GIs, the harmonica was played by Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and President Abraham Lincoln. Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann invented it in the early ...

There are few instruments stranger than a harmonica. While there are chromatic versions of the harmonica, most players use the ones that are set in a certain key. That way, no matter what you blow, it ...