Right. The best exponents of “how to play the blues harmonica”. Little Walter. Both Sonny Boy Williamsons (unrelated). Junior Reed. Men whose mastery of the techniques required in order to play the blues harmonica make Mozart’s facility with a piano seem trifling.
Little Walter invented half the techniques you need in order to play the blues harmonica, including the percussively-named “triple-tonguing”, a trick that lets you play the blues harmonica as though you were a train coming into a station. You know when you hear people play the blues harmonica and it sounds like that – like the rhythm of a train coming, a hobo express? That’s triple tonguing. To play the blues harmonica in triple tongue, you need to be able to bang the tip of your tongue against specific holes whilst circular breathing: as you play the blues harmonica like that the tongue neatly packages the flow of air into staccato bursts. When you play the blues harmonica in triple tongue your playing echoes the classic blues rhythm – my baby left me, she done gone, da-da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum.
The key technique a person needs, if he or she is to play the blues harmonica with success, is the “note bend”. When you first try to play the blues harmonica with a note bend, it’s as well to have someone on hand who knows the Heimlich manoeuvre so they can retrieve the harp when you swallow it. To play the blues harmonica with note bending, you suck a note through the reeds of the harmonica, whilst drawing your tongue back into your mouth. When you play the blues harmonica with a bent note the tip of the tongue has to stay flat on the floor of your mouth or it won’t work: which means that this method of playing the blues harmonica basically involves developing a whole new set of muscles in your throat, so you can drop the floor of your mouth down into it. Still interested? Buy yourself a porkpie hat and some cigarettes and jump to it.