Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
The podcast is sponsored by Seydel harmonicas. Check out their great range of products at www.seydel1847.com.
If you would like to make a voluntary contribution to help keep the podcast running then please use this link: https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour.
Visit the main podcast webpage at: https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com/
Contact: happyhourharmonicapodcast@gmail.com
Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
Herbert Quelle interview
Herbert Quelle joins me on episode 69.
Herbert is a German who worked as a diplomat for 40 years. This included 10 years as the German Consul in the US, where he met several distinguished harmonica names. With a deep interest in the harmonica, Herbert has researched the instrument to great depth, using this information to litter facts into his two fictional works centred on our beloved instrument. He tells us of the huge export of harmonicas from Germany to the US, and how the early marketing often described harmonicas as toys.
Herbert regularly makes readings from his books, with some in this podcast episode.
Links:
Herbert’s website:
https://www.harpambassador.com
Monika’s Blues book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Monikas-Blues-Harmonica-African-American-Culture/dp/1880788276
Harmonica History article for Harmonica Happenings magazine:
https://jimdo-storage.global.ssl.fastly.net/file/059116cb-8889-486c-adab-ddc013dcf638/Texte%20280122.pdf
Early harmonica recordings by The Archivist (Roger Trobridge), introduced by Joe Filisko:
https://www.mixcloud.com/PodKast/rare-early-harmonica-recordings-by-vocalists-and-instrumentalists-introduced-by-joe-filisko/
Adam Gussow book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mister-Satans-Apprentice-Blues-Memoir/dp/0816667756
Pat Missin’s recordings of Arthur Turelly and Pete Hampton:
https://www.patmissin.com/78rpm/78rpm.html
Herbert playing the German National Anthem:
https://thomasguntherproductions.bandcamp.com/track/german-national-anthem-deutschland-lied
Mundharmonika Live (Seydel harmonica convention):
https://mundharmonika-live.de/
Videos:
Herbert’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/herbieqkeys
A German American Love Story (Harmonica exports to the US):
https://youtu.be/pGigFF1Zkn8
Herbert playing I Feel Free:
https://youtu.be/AYnRdgX77gY
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
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmea
Herbert Quelle joins me on episode 69. Herbert is a German who worked as a diplomat for 40 years. This included 10 years as a German consul in the US, where he met several distinguished harmonica names. With a deep interest in the harmonica, Herbert has researched the instrument to great depth, using this information to litter facts into his two fictional works centred on our beloved instrument. He tells us of the huge export of harmonicas from Germany to the US and how the early marketing often described harmonicas as toys He also looked at some of the early endorsers of harmonicas. Herbert regularly makes readings from his books, with some included in this podcast episode. After the sponsorship announcement, Herbert makes a reading from the foreword from his book, written by Billy Branch. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram
SPEAKER_02:at Seidel Harmonicas. Although Monica's Blues does not make these themes the central focus of the novel, it wisely, nonetheless, does not avoid them. After all, the blues, according to Willie Dixon, is the facts of life.
SPEAKER_00:Hello, Herbert Quelle, and welcome to the podcast. Hi Neil, great to meet you. Thanks so much for joining today. So a little bit about yourself to begin with. So you are a harmonica enthusiast and you've delved deeply into the history of the harmonica and written a couple of books on the harmonica. I have indeed,
SPEAKER_02:yes.
SPEAKER_00:So we'll get into definitely the history of the harmonica and its important part, particularly in American society and, of course, blues music in general across the world. So you were a diplomat in your professional career, yeah? I was indeed, yeah. 40 years in the German
SPEAKER_02:Foreign Service.
SPEAKER_00:And that took you to, I think you lived in the US for, what, 10 years or so?
SPEAKER_02:I lived in the U.S. a total of 10 years, counting in one year as a student at a small undergraduate college in Virginia in the 70s. And then in my professional diplomatic career, I had my first posting at the end of Route 66 in Los Angeles, then one year sabbatical at Harvard, Boston, and then the last five years at the beginning of Route 66 in Chicago, of all places.
SPEAKER_00:Right, and so you have a, your website is called The Harp Ambassador. That's linked to your career, I take it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I just, I was looking for a catchy word, as everybody does. I got an email from a friend of mine, from Ben Bowman, who's the harp master, as you know. So everybody finds their title.
SPEAKER_00:Probably worth mentioning as a timely thing here, that as part of this role you met Queen Elizabeth II, who of course recently passed away.
SPEAKER_02:I did indeed, and I'm not a royal but I was impressed when I met her when I had the chance to even say hello in a small very short private conversation while my ambassador presented his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen and then she takes in the two other personnel that the ambassador is entitled to take along in a private meeting and so I had a brief exchange with her I met her on another occasion during the regular ambassadorial receptions that she did in
SPEAKER_00:Buckingham Palace. So the question is, did you give the Queen a harmonica as a gift when you
SPEAKER_02:met her? No, I think protocol at the palace would be very mindful not to permit gestures of that kind. But I mean, there have been examples in history, especially Hohner is famous for that. I'm just thinking of the episode when they presented the recently elected President Eisenhower in the US, early 53, with a golden harmonica that plays a role in my latest book, Kein Fallschatz, Sonnenschlag, No Translate That Black Music Matters, where I construed a meeting with an American guy, a soldier, who was proud to announce I am Ike, because he was named after Ike. Because that was Eisenhower's nickname, Eich. So they chat in the German Harmonica Museum with one of the heroes of my book. And the story there is that this golden harmonica that Eisenhower was presented with at the initiative of Hohner via the president of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, where Hohner is located in Trossingen. And the golden harmonica that I tried to find in the presidential library for Abilene, Kansas, for President Eisenhower is not there. So it's a mystery. And one of the tasks will be to hopefully locate the harmonica. What became of the golden harmonica presented to President Eisenhower?
SPEAKER_00:If anybody listening to this podcast knows, then do let us know and maybe we'll help track it down. Of course, you do play the harmonica. Was it a tremolo harmonica you first got when you were a young teenager? I was, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:In other podcasts I heard with you, that's a typical story. I got one from my father, but I wasn't happy with it. I was 13, I think, at the time. And then a few years later, I heard the first blues musicians from the UK, John Mayle, the Blues Blakers.
UNKNOWN:.
SPEAKER_01:Some
SPEAKER_02:others in Canteed from the US, and I said that tremolo is not the instrument to imitate that on, so I got a blues harp at the time.
SPEAKER_00:You've been playing blues harp since about 15, I think.
SPEAKER_02:I guess so, maybe a little later. But then I put it away and I think I touched it, of course, occasionally, but I never focused on it. I was more focused on my career and I'm also playing keyboard, piano and guitar. So those were instruments of my choice of the time. But then I seriously picked it up again before... Shortly before I went to Chicago, I mean, Chicago is one of the places, if not the best place, to take up harmonica because there are so many famous players there, players who have revolutionized the instrument. Take Joe Felisco out of Joliet, Chicago, as a customizer for Horner.¶¶ And without Joe, I guess, Hohner would have suffered in the 90s when they had terrible problems with the introduction of blues harp series. And you have, of course, Howard Levy, who about the same time in the early 90s, systematized the chromatic playing on the diatonic. They became not only teachers in a way, but real friends. And what better place can you be?
SPEAKER_00:No, absolutely. The home of the blues, for sure. Well, the home of the blues in the north of the US, at least. One of your relatives, your uncle, I think, was a composer and pianist, yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he lives in Munich. He was a great inspiration to me, in a way, first as a classical pianist, and then he went into what we call Unterhaltungsmusik, easy listening music with his compositions. Yeah, he was a benchmark in my decision at the time, not becoming a professional musician because I knew that I couldn't meet the standards.
SPEAKER_00:I'm sure you probably made more money as a diplomat than musicians. It's a tough life. Did you have piano lessons and follow that route?
SPEAKER_02:I had piano lessons, but only for two and a half years. Then my teacher noticed that I was tempted to improvise too much and that didn't go along with her classical training rigidity. And so we quit. Then I picked up guitar playing. I tried to learn bass and played in bands and keyboard in bands. I would consider myself a mediocre piano player. It's fine to entertain around the Christmas table and have you
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so what made you switch across to the harmonica? And then obviously your great interest in researching the history of the harmonica.
SPEAKER_02:When I was posted to Chicago, I got the idea that I should do an exhibition on the history of this instrument from German lands at the time, beginning in the 1820s, and the adaptation of it by American musicians mostly blues musicians. So the relationship between the hardware, the instrument and the software, the music as it were. And I found out very, very soon after having spoken with a couple of experts in Germany who had published books on side aspects of that and spoken with the director of the German Harmonica Museum, Martin Heffner, and was the director of the Music Instrument Museum here in Berlin that there had even been an exhibition already on the subject a few years prior. But still, I wanted to focus it on the Chicago area. And when I developed this, going along with picking up the harp again and trying to imitate some of the players of the Chicago area, Little Walter and Sunny Boys and Junior Wells...
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:And then I found out that I was not a designer of an exhibition. I lacked the skills to do that, and I did not have the resources to find somebody to do that for me. But I had sampled so much material already for what I considered to be the structure, at least, of a book. And then I said, well, let me try and write a novel. And a novel very soon developed, which was my My first book then published in 2017 in Indianapolis. I found a publisher for that, Monica's Blues. All along, I worked on my playing. I met Joe Filisco. I met Howard Levy. I started subscribing to... Howard's channel on artist works and took online lessons with him. So a whole new world developed that I wanted to get into. So the chromatic playing on the diatonic fascinated me beyond learning some blues licks. Since then, I've been crazy, and I'm fortunate enough to have so much time. I mean, one of the reasons for retirees, I mean, we say we never have time, and that is true because most of us, fortunately, have hobbies that keep us busy, and mine is certainly playing harmonica, and I do it for hours every day.
SPEAKER_00:Great. Good to hear. So before we get into your book, let's talk a bit more about the harmonica history, which you've looked into in some depth, and which I know plays an important part of your book. So you touched on this a little bit when I interviewed the product managers from Seidel and Hohner on a few episodes back. But yeah, it'd be good if we can dig into that.
SPEAKER_02:Austria was the first place. Vienna had the beginnings of the industry in the 1820s. Then a little Later, it was this place north of Stuttgart, Klingin. And then a little later, it was Trossingen, just about the same distance, 100 kilometers south of Stuttgart. In Saxony, you had this area which is called the Vogtland. There is a Bavarian and a Thuringian and a Saxon Vogtland. But it's like a little triangle that goes into the northern border or the northern territory of the Czech Republic which historically is known as Bohemia, Böhmen. And at the eastern end of Bohemia, you have a place called Haida. I think it's Nowy Bór these days. And that's the place where this Josef Richter lived, who plays an important role in the history of harmonica design, because he's the inventor of the ten-hole harmonica. If you go to the German Harmonica Museum in There are excerpts from a letter by the then boss of Hohner, Matthias Hohner, from 83, if I'm not mistaken, who states clearly that the ten-hole harmonica with the Richter tuning goes back to this Josef Richter and that it first appeared, he speaks of 20 to 25 years. So that has always been the date that I given for the origin of it it's around 1860 then it also a little later got into the hands most probably of African Americans and there are a couple of dates that are proven these days which proven by mentions in the local newspapers which speak of a I have to use this derogatory term so I put in quotation marks a darkie that's a quotation from this newspaper in Kansas playing the harmonica in a local prison and that goes back to the 1870s and so we can date more or less when you have the first meeting with the most influential players of the instrument for our taste I would say these days namely the blues which is about that time, but the blues, of course, did not yet exist. The blues came into being around the turn of the century, but the instrument was in the hand of African Americans earlier than that. If you take, for instance, W.C. Handy's autobiography, where he gives examples that prove that. So we've touched my long reply to your answer on two things. When did the instrument meet the African American player, get into its And what is the most likely date of the, we have no exact year, but most likely date, the invention of the Richter harmonica, which is the most style formative and the one we use these days all the time.
SPEAKER_00:So was the Richter tuning picked up by Horner for the first time?
SPEAKER_02:No, it was developed by this guy in Haida, which was a different company, but then taken up by manufacturers in the Klingenthal area, where Seidel, the producer of my choice, resides, and in Trossing, because Matthias Horner just realized the potential of the instrument. And then the Marine Band, which is based on the Richter tuning of course, came only out in 1896. What happened in the gap between, we don't know, or at least I do not know. I've never particularly researched that because I was most interested in what do we know exactly about the origin, the date of the Richter harmonica, and then its usage in the United States.
SPEAKER_00:You know, a question we're always fascinated as diatonic players is, you know, how did the Richter tuning turn into this great sort of vehicle for blues and I think it's clear that it wasn't the intention that when they made it that they would be able to bend it in that way.
SPEAKER_02:I think we all agree that none of these guys had in their heads, because they couldn't at the time, the blues did not exist. That is the first thing to realize. It was too early for that. So the instrument with its capacity for the blues was there before the blues, which tells us that the instrument was not built for the blues. Gerd Müller corrected describes playing technique that in the middle register you play the melody and if you want you throw in the chords that give you the deep register or the left register. They didn't think of anything else.
SPEAKER_00:So it was just a happy coincidence that the chords...
SPEAKER_02:It was the way that this harmonic feeling or the scale feeling that comes with your genes, with your ancestors having come to the United States as slaves. You have different semitones in your hair, which are, as we know, with a third halfway between or somewhere between the minor and the major scale. And that note is so easy to hit if you do not apply the playing technique that the builders of the instrument or designers, constructors, whatever you want to call them, of the instrument had in mind. They mostly blowing I would argue they thought of the instrument although it always had the draw reeds built in but they thought of it mostly as a blow instrument whereas suddenly the African Americans discovered this is for us a draw instrument because the draw bends are there and we can play the major seventh scale of the fifth of the key that the harmonic is in whether they theorize it as in the same way as we do these days, I very much doubt. I think it was just intuitively that they heard that because at the time there were no schools. There were no books. You had to learn it, which makes the instrument also so great intuitively. And just by their intuition, they discovered this. They thought, wow, this is it. And again, this was not in 1860 because the blues with its scale was maybe there in well the scale was certainly there but the blues pattern that we know this sequence of first fourth and then fifth and fourth and going back to one that
SPEAKER_00:only developed around 1900 A huge part and again of your work and what you've researched as you've touched on a little bit is this kind of what you've called this German American love affair and the fact that the US was the main place where the harmonicas were exported from Germany and the Exactly. I think I've read that sort of 100 million harmonicas have been exported from
SPEAKER_02:Germany to the US. They have the records of this most amazing institution in history that I discovered, the U.S. Consular Agency in Markneukirchen, which is the larger entity where also Klingenthal, next to Klingenthal, they had this consular agency there from 1893 to 1916, so shortly before the U.S. entered into First World War against Germany. And these archives are so important because They detail and compile the export figures of the harmonica from that part of Germany to the United States. And as I said, I didn't have these data when I wrote the first novel, but I used it for my second novel, Kein Falscher Zunschlag, Black Music Matters, which is only in German so far. I'm working with friends in the United States, maybe to find a topic. translator, but I can't invest 10,000 euro, which normally would cost for an official translation.
SPEAKER_00:Your English sounds pretty good to me, Herbert.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, I mean, I had a friend who said, you should never try to translate your own stuff. So I've now come up with the more concrete figure of 250 million harmonicas that were imported by the US from Yeah, so that's always played
SPEAKER_00:a massive part in the harmonica music that we know and love, particularly the blues. Do you know why the US is, you know, so strong, you know, dominant as part of that exported from Germany?
SPEAKER_02:Well, first we had this craze of the harmonica orchestras, which did not, to my knowledge, exist. Maybe a little bit in the United Kingdom, but certainly not on that scale. You had thousands of harmonica orchestras in the US between the 20s and the early 40s. And if you have thousands of orchestras with up to 100 players, I mean, That alone explains that you need massive loads of instruments to equip these orchestras.
SPEAKER_00:They would largely be orchestral harmonicas though, would they? So were you talking mainly chromatics, bass and chords or not diatonics?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think you always had at least one diatonic in it and then you had chromatic and you had the chord harmonicas, of course, and the bass harmonica. When we talk about 250 million, we're not talking 250 million diatonic harmonicas. It's the total of all harmonics. Breaking it down to diatonics would be a little difficult because there were also parts of the exports, which were more like toys. And there's a definition by American customs that harmonica is counted as far as customs goes as an instrument if it has more than one octave. And I think there was a price involved with it. It escapes me at the moment. But anyway, the industry itself for some time was interested in rather marketing the harmonica as a toy because it gave them the scale, but not the import duties. It was cheaper if they counted as toys, so they could sell more.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So that might be a big contribution to this kind of reputation of it being a toy, then it was marketed in that way.
SPEAKER_02:It was indeed. And I mean, if you look at some of the models that have these bells added on, or these, well, all sorts of gimmicks and the shapes that came in as postcards or what have you. In a way to me, it shows they themselves considered this a consumer article, which was attractive and brought in a lot of money. And they tried to outdo each other with original packing material and colorful boxes and what have you, but also the outer shape of the instrument. They did not focus on so much in my understanding on the playability, giving a congenial player the possibility to really develop his musical skills on the instrument. They focused for a long time on other aspects. And I would say that the serious approach to the instrument side of it goes along with, I would say, 1920s. So before that, it was a pretty mixed bag
SPEAKER_00:yeah I think a lot you look at other instruments don't you when they become very popular you get lots of cheap versions made don't you you can see that across many different instruments so you know and you kind of flood the market with cheap instruments and then you know and then obviously there's some quality ones in there as well but if you're looking for some of that they're quite hard to find so I guess it was the same with the harmonicas as well so you know was it the marine band from Hohner which kind of took the mantle as being the first good quality that you know was picked up by the sort of you know the black blues players
SPEAKER_02:I would say
SPEAKER_00:yeah
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, of course, not only by them. I would still argue that at the time there were many folk, white folk music players in the US who appreciated that instrument.
UNKNOWN:piano plays Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:but certainly was the characteristics of playing that we appreciate until today in the hands of African-American players.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so let's get on to your book now, which again we mentioned. It's called Monica's Blues. Of course, Monica being a female name, which is this kind of shortening of harmonica. I assume that's why you chose it. So on the trail of the German harmonica and African-American blues culture is a kind of subtitle. So it's a fictional story, isn't it, about kind of weaving the It is. It
SPEAKER_02:was this attempt to look at the origin of some of the players in the Mississippi Delta and see what we find if we go there and the state of Mississippi, although being a very traditional minded state for a long time, developing this blues trail and now marketing itself also with the wealth of immaterial wealth, I should say, with the ideas and the ingenuity of players coming from it. And so you have across the state all these markers and it was my goal to actually travel to many of these markers of famous harmonica players.
SPEAKER_00:Which players? You can name a few of them for us. Howlin' Wolf,
SPEAKER_02:for instance, comes from Charlie Musselwhite, comes from Kosciuszko.
UNKNOWN:Howlin' Wolf
SPEAKER_02:And I was planning to meet one guy who teaches in Oxford at the Universal Reads at Oxford, Mississippi, Adam Gousseau, who is a very nice guy and great, great lector. I appreciate his online courses. I never met him in person. I spoke with him on the phone. I had email exchanges with him on his book, Mr. Satan's Apprentice, which is a great book to read. He is there. There are In Clarksdale, there's Roger Stolle, who published a book himself. And there are these blues festivals in Clarksdale and other places down there. I mean, other blues musicians, of course. B.B. King hailed from Mississippi. And I name all of them in the book.
SPEAKER_00:So many more, yeah. So again, the story kind of tracks the kind of struggle of African-Americans and the kind of, you know, it's linked to slaves and then how blues evolved. So maybe give us an insight into that.
SPEAKER_02:First, I was conscious that I'm a white person and that I should not be arrogant and try to tell a story which is African-American. That's why I had African-American friends. Fortunately, Billy Branch is a great harmonica player.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, of course, Billy Branch is on the cover, isn't he? And also wrote the foreword for the book as well. He is, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And there's another guy whom I whom I quote, Lincoln T. Beauchamp and the Chicago Bull, and maybe I can read that. There is no exact person, time or location which actually gave birth to the blues. Certainly we did not leap off slave ships and onto the auction block playing harmonicas and doing the jitterbug. The souls of black folks have innate characteristics and blues is a manifestation of those affected by certain conditions. I took that in and so I wrote this with consciousness of their story, which is not... Certainly not my story. When I had the draft ready, I went to Chicago Bowl and I went to Billy Branch and said, go over this, please, for me, whether I'm insulting anybody of your ethnicity. That's certainly not my intention. But I want to tell the story which so far nobody has told in this directness that we actually, we totally owe the blues, which is for me on the same level, at least. as the Roomba as an immaterial world treasure. And unfortunately, the United States has never taken this up with the UNESCO. The blues should be there with that distinction and that honor, at least as I said, the Roomba, which Cuba achieved, which is with its clever policy in the United Nations.
UNKNOWN:Music Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:So the blues is one that we owe to African Americans originally. They were not the first to make money with it. The first to make money with it were, again, whites. Producers were white guys. The owners of record studios were white guys. These players came into the 60s, I would argue, with their instruments, and they were paid for the session and if they had a great idea and the idea was taken up, they didn't get any credits for it. The credits went to the producer who was very often the owner of the studio. One has to bear all that in mind that there's also a certain feeling that goes along with a white guy like me taking up the issue and writing about it because it's very sensitive which hardly any white person who has never befriended an African American is aware of.
SPEAKER_00:So, again, so the book, you know, it picks on, you know, why black Americans picked up the instrument, I assume, because it was cheap and readily available was the main reason for that. Exactly. And then culturally, you know, does it touch on, you know, why the reason that blues became so strong and that they became such a dominant force with that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it touches on the basic idea of playing it, but also that it was criticized in the African-American culture itself as being anti-Christian. It was, in many circles, it was forbidden. You were permitted to play gospel music, if you could, on the harmonica or hymns. But blues music was, even within the own culture, sort of was not forbidden. accepted. It changed very, very slowly. I touched on the fact that in the 60s, with the political emancipation of African Americans, blues became even less popular than it had been before. And blacks who acquired some wealth and made some progress in society even looked down on it. They would then switch in their musical likings to soul music or to jazz. The popularity of blues Again, with the instrument, in many cases, then happened by, the Americans call it the British invasion, by British groups performing in the US. The British groups, the Stems and others, they opened the way for black blues musicians to perform in venues that had been closed to them before. you
SPEAKER_00:wrote this book here
SPEAKER_02:in what year now? Monika's Blues was written in 2017 and the sequel which builds I mean this Monika's Blues is the story of this guy traveling to the 70 year old retired college professor traveling to the Mississippi Delta in search of the sites where a famous harmonica player is hailed from and then he meets this African American family and he gets involved in their story and this guy just passed way where there's a wedding ceremony happened to be an officer, a black officer of American forces in Germany and he was a harmonica collector, has his own private museum and he has a grandson who develops a liking to this white college professor and then the condition for taking up the inheritance for this grandson and inheriting the harmonica collection is that he should visit the sites of Seidel, Klingenthal and of Hohner, Trossingen in Germany. His grandfather leaves money to this guy whose name is James. He then says, well, in order to meet the requirements of the last will, just ask this professor who is a German immigrant to give me a tour to these sites. So that's where Monica's Blues ends and where The new book, which was published in 2020, kicks in. So that is then the travel to Germany and tells the story of the end of the Second World War with the role the Americans played in the liberation of it and starting in Frankfurt. And then we go to Stuttgart and we go to the sites, to Trossingen and to Klingenthal. And lots of things happen in between. And I build in the research of the archives. in Stuttgart of Hohner and of College Park, Maryland, the U.S. Archives, when we visit Klingenthal, just giving the figures of exports and discovering the endorser-producer relationship. Because there was a lot of material I found on some endorsers which existed since the 1920s, at least on the side of Hohner. Seidel, never. That has been confirmed. firm by Lars Seifert, by the CEO, apparently never had the concept of endorsers, but Hohner had it. Famous endorsers like Larry Adler and other lesser known, like Arthur
SPEAKER_01:Torelli.
SPEAKER_02:That is fascinating to me, just to know what did they get in the case of Arthur Torelli, which again plays into the figures, the huge numbers of instruments that we talked about earlier. I mean, he could just demand and get anything. He got hundreds of harmonicas, sometimes within a month, which he used for himself and gave away. He passed, I think, in the 1990s. 1950s. There's this one picture with him where he teaches Cary Grant playing harmonica for the movie.
SPEAKER_00:So he's arbitrarily the first known Hohner and Dorsey?
SPEAKER_02:Well, he's the one with the most documented letter exchange. There are others I mentioned which I didn't find more record on, like Mr. Sisto. Some are not known. But what is interesting and what I'm still after, and maybe you earlier invited the audience to contribute with their knowledge, I had the hope to get access to the archives of Hohner which exist in the United States Because I could never find any letter exchange with African-American players, although we know that TV Wonder was and is a Hohner endorser. There were others of African-American scene played only Hohner instruments. So what I would love to find is some exchange with them on the conditions that they struck with the producer for playing Hohner. And it is also obvious in this context that especially Hohner, and maybe it's only because it's the only records that we have, the only correspondence that we have to date, which reveals that they didn't care much until the late 60s about the blues, although at that time, I mean, they produced the blues harp, and they made a lot of money through this instrument. But in the competitions in Trossingen, I think the first year was 1969 or so, that they had blues as a genre in the competition there. And I find it crazy. Or this being taken care of by the American side. But as I say, I've tried through Hohner to get to the archives. I don't even know whether they exist and where they might be in the US. I've so far not been successful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. think maybe some of the earlier harmonica festivals focused on chromatics more didn't they and reading music and maybe that's why and diatonic sort of came into it a bit later because of that focus on you know kind of music reading chromatic side and orchestral So as you say, you've got your two books and your Black Music Matters one, the second one, that is currently awaiting translation into English. When might that be out for people to read? I promised some friends
SPEAKER_02:it should be out this year. Well, let's say next year.
SPEAKER_00:Sure, yeah. And the books are available on Amazon. And you do readings from the books, don't you? I do. I do what
SPEAKER_02:I call musical readings where I just give a brief overview of the history of the instrument currently characteristics, being the smallest instrument that you have, on which you can play three octaves, the only one with blow and draw playing possibility, and then getting into the particular story. And I illustrate it by some of the first recordings that we have, first fox chases on records, and the first blues record in 1925 by Dandy Stovepipe, Henry Witter, and then there was this guy, Pete Hampton, who lived in Missouri, I think, who lived in London for seven or eight years, and he did a recording that Pat Misson has on his website from 1904. has nothing to do with blues.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, so thanks. Great that you've done some writing on harmonica. You know, it's great to see that that's available. And you know, there's not so many books available on harmonica, or some, but yeah, good to encourage more people to get out writing about harmonica as well. A little bit onto some of the music that you play. Obviously, you've recorded one album, which is a Christmas album with Thomas Gunter, I assume he's a German colleague of yours. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Composer and arranger is a great player. He is from Stuttgart, Germany and has lived in the United States for two decades.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so how did this Christmas album of yours come about?
SPEAKER_02:Well, we knew each other for a while, and we both had the idea. We just, when we had a coffee together, chatted about what one could do, and it just coincided. And he said, well, that's the idea that I've had for a long time, and let's get together. And he said, I'll do some arrangements. So that's how it happened.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I do think Harmonica does Christmas songs very well, so it's always nice.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:you've got a youtube channel with various clips on as well so um there's a there's a funny one of you playing i feel free at the end of the covid lockdown
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:you look very happy but you you didn't look i don't think you were happy being locked up by the by the looks of things no show me anybody who was happy being locked up and um you know you played this book there are a few as well which is uh you know an altar joy so certainly not just playing blues, and also the German national anthem as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's not commonly applied, but I think it's great to play some anthems on harmonica.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah. you like to write some lyrics as well, yeah? I do, I do, yeah. I think Western Honeymoon is about a... Western
SPEAKER_02:Honeymoon, yeah, the killing of, so-called honor killing, which was one of the most terrible things that you can have if a family member kills a girl within the family because she is behaving in a way contra, against the norms.
SPEAKER_00:And, you know, you've done loads of travel. Obviously, you've worked as a diplomat in numerous countries. We talked about the U.S., but you've worked in other countries. But also, I think you've traveled around the U.S. a lot, searching out these places, you know, these kind of blues places as part of your novel research and other things, yeah? And that's kind of documented on your website.
SPEAKER_02:I have, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So is that mainly around the U.S. that you're looking around and you're going to put on, you're sort of building this for your website now, yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the travels were, as I said earlier, to the Mississippi Delta and places where the SPA convention took place. So I was in St. Louis, Missouri, participating. Maybe not everybody knows what SPA stands for, the Society for the Preservation and the Advancement of the Harmonica, which is the largest harmonica association in the United States.
SPEAKER_00:Also the largest network. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. And there was another convention in Tulsa that I went to, and I traveled to the harmonica workshops that we have in Germany, too. So the Hohner Master Workshops, and I'll go to Klingenthal later this week to join the Mundharmonica Live, which is sponsored by Seidel and organized by aficionados
SPEAKER_00:of the harmonica in Klingenthal. The question I ask each time is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?
SPEAKER_02:If I have only 10 minutes, I would still do chord and octave playing practice or maybe fifth practice on Irish tunes because I attended a class with Joel Anderson, whom you also had on your great podcast. I just find Irish music with the accentuation, the rhythm and the melody so appealing to harmonica playing. And I got some easy third tunings that I just love because this minor sounding harmonica is just fantastic.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, it's great. As you say, those Irish tunes and other sorts of tunes work so great in the harmonica as well.
UNKNOWN:And...
SPEAKER_00:So you mentioned already you play Seidel harmonicas, yeah? So that's your... I do, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:yeah. Do you play just diatonics or do you play anything else, chromatics or anything?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I have a chromatic. I have an old Hohner chromatic, but I hardly ever use it. I've decided that there's enough to learn on a diatonic and I don't want to confuse myself with the wider holes on a chromatic.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, that's great. And you mentioned the easy third tuning there. So any other tunings you like to use?
SPEAKER_02:No. Other than that, I use regular Richter tuning and obviously some very, very tricky notes to play. The overdraw on the seventh and on the ninth. So on higher harmonicas, unless they are customized, I can't. And I don't have customized harmonicas. I try to fiddle around a little bit, getting the overdraws or maybe the overblows even myself. but I have never invested in any customized work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so obviously you do play overblows. You said you had lessons with Howard Levy.
SPEAKER_02:I do, yeah, sure, sure. And one of the greatest challenges, apart from hitting a clear and vibrato-sounding double draw on the third, is hitting a not-too-flat overblow on fifth.
SPEAKER_00:Sure, yeah. To get that major seventh in second position. So you're not tempted to use the major seventh tuning then to get that note without an overblow? No. Well, obviously, as a student of Howard's, I'm sure overblows are definitely high on your list. Yeah. And what about your embouchure? Are you puckering, tongue blocking?
SPEAKER_02:Both. And since the class with Joel, I'm using much more tongue blocking. And I mean, Joe Felisco was the first who said, Herbert, no block, no rock. and I've always believed it but I found it easier to packer still I have to discipline myself occasionally to use tongue more but the more I get into I mean if you are into octave playing and chord playing combining it with single notes you can't do without the tongue so I mean you don't have it on the side you have it in the middle but I find that just gives so much more to the instrument
SPEAKER_01:and
SPEAKER_02:the idea for my taking class with Joel and what I've been working on, and if you want I can give a little example maybe, is German or Alpine folk music.
SPEAKER_00:What the harmonica was originally designed for?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but in a fresher way, using all the new techniques with Overblow on first, for instance, and using all the bend notes on third. So I find it great. I'm working on that. I I'm not yet there where I want to be, but it's something that I love.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you can give us a demo, a quick demo if you like. What about amplifiers? Do you use any amplifiers when you're playing or just clean sound?
SPEAKER_02:I prefer clean sound with, I think, a hall effect or a slight echo is very helpful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, a bit of reverb, yeah. And what about microphones? Again, you're using a sort of clean microphone for that then, I take
SPEAKER_02:it? You're hitting on my weak side. I'm not a technician.
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_02:I have a bulletini, which I once acquired at the spa convention. You know, the small bullet mic. microphone
SPEAKER_00:yeah from Greg Heumann yeah
SPEAKER_02:yeah yeah and I love it for certain stuff for slightly distorted music and I use it with his with his holder The racket. The racket, yeah. I use it with that and I love that for certain stuff. The Jimi Hendrix stuff, American National Anthem, that's what is great.
SPEAKER_00:Your future plans then? You've got a few readings coming up seeing your website. I have,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. I'm approaching people, trying to interest more people. So I don't want to compete with who are teaching harmonica. I certainly could do beginners classes myself, and there might be even interest here in my vicinity. But I speak together with Marko Jovanovic in his Berlin Harmonica School on the 24th and 25th. I have a reading there in his convention or festival this year. And I look forward to that very much. And I think through connecting and networking there, I will continue to build a base for the musical readings because I find if you try to communicate the rich history of the harmonica in a light way, I try to do with my novels and with musical examples, you can attract people to the instrument who would otherwise never have thought of even bothering thinking about harmonica.
SPEAKER_00:How about you give us another reading now, Herbert?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, this is the first chapter of Monica's Blues, headlined Solicitation, and it's in quotation marks. Hello, my friend. I'm Monica Marine. Come play with me. My slightly curved, shiny metal coat hides a rectangular wooden comb body with nine teeth, square struts. The teeth become gradually shorter from one side to the other. The space between them is far too wide for normal hair and too narrow for dreadlocks. But as I hardly leave the house without decent cover, you would not get the idea of using me for your hairdo anyhow.
SPEAKER_00:So thanks so much for joining me today, Herbert Quelle. Thank you so much, Neil, for having me. Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast, and be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Thanks to Herbert for sharing with us all his learnings about the history of the harmonica and the role of African Americans in making it so central to blues music, all the harmonica we love so much. Thanks again for listening. Do check out the website on monicahappyhour.com. If you're so inclined to make a donation towards the running cost of the podcast, you can do so at the website. Check out the Spotify playlist, which is linked off the website page. And we're just going to finish off now with Herbert making us another reading from his first novel, Monica's Blues.
SPEAKER_02:So this is from chapter 11 of Monica's Blues, where Lincoln T. Beauchamp, also called Chicago Beau, is quoted in a way with an interview that he did with Junior Wells. And I quote, with Junior opened my eyes to an aspect of the relationship between the harp and the American blues that I had not thought of before. As official American, quote, blues ambassador, unquote, on tour in the service of the U.S. Department of State, Junior Wells blew and sucked on the German harp all around the world. I now fully grasped the meaning of the inscription on his tombstone, quote, bluesman to the world, unquote. Junior tells about his tours to Africa in 1967 or 68, and that he was with Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the Ivory Coast. Humphrey commended him for doing more with his concerts in a few days than U.S. diplomacy had achieved in 30 years. In appreciation, he arranged for Junior, who was already in his mid-30s, to finish high school. Junior declined to do the tour of South Africa, to which he was invited next, because he refused to stay in a hotel where South African blacks had no access. Some of the interview passages on the situation in the United States sound quite frustrated, especially when Junior talks about blacks killing each other and not getting anything else right except for that. He's just as critical about their lack of cultural identification and their materialistic attitude as to how he got to play harmonica that was the most comprehensive story I had seen. After moving up to Chicago with his mother in 1941 at age 17, he was first only messing around with the harmonica. During a visit to his former home near Memphis, he met Sonny Boy Williamson, too, and asked him to teach him to play. The next part of the interview is so interesting that it needs to be quoted verbatim. So he said, let me see your harp. And I had one of them old American ace harps. And he throwed it to the ground and stomped on it. He said, don't never bring no mess like that in front of me. If you want a harmonica, you buy a harmonica, you know. You buy a harp. Don't come in here with that mess. Harps wasn't but about 15 cent at the drugstore, you know. They had a Rexall drugstore up there on the highway. And I went there and got me one. Unquote.