Adam Gussow interview

Adam Gussow joins me on episode 73.

Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there.
Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album. Satan & Adam enjoyed great success, playing together for 15 years, releasing three albums before disbanding in 1998, re-forming some years later and releasing another album.
With the passing of Mr Satan, Adam formed his own one-man band, then a duo which has recently added Mr Satan’s nephew: Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors.
Adam was the first person to release blues tuition videos on YouTube and has had over 20 million hits, accompanied by his website Modern Blues Harmonica.

Links:
Adam’s website:
https://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/home.html

Satan & Adam documentary:
http://satanandadamfilm.com/

Pete Farmer kick drums and harmonica holders:
https://www.footdrums.com/

Videos:

U2's Rattle and Hum clip of Satan and Adam:
https://youtu.be/x6M2aWVx0LA

Ronnie Shellist ‘Funky Blues Harmonica’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs_OchfmBc8

Gussow's classic blues harmonica videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfYHJbTZklgZU1bEVLaZyvQ

Modern Blues Harmonica YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/kudzurunner

YouTube video teaching Sunshine of Your Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqFnpCcvUvQ

Adam busking solo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E3qQ59VcQ

Crossroads video:
https://youtu.be/KeMis-B7f58

Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors: What’d I Say:
https://youtu.be/retCfgoCO3M

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.blowsmeaway.com/

Chapters

• 1:30 I first heard Adam playing on on his 3rd Satan & Adam album in an Oxford Street bookshop in London, in the mid 1990s
• 2:08 Adam was raised in and around New York
• 2:32 Not many people on the podcast have been from New York: and the blues scene there
• 4:22 Blues scene in New York is more modern than Chicago and other areas of the US
• 5:00 Blues scene in New York is not as vibrant as it was
• 5:17 Adam now lives in Mississippi where he is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the university there and has written several books on blues, harmonica and black culture
• 5:48 Still an active musician down in Mississippi
• 5:55 Studied at Princeton and Colombia universities
• 6:04 Played guitar in a high school jazz funk fusion band
• 6:32 Went to Berklee music school for a short stint
• 7:11 Returned to Princeton and wrote a dissertation on blues music and southern violence
• 7:51 Willie Dixon and BB King witnessed violence in the south that heavily influenced their blues music
• 9:34 Adam started playing harmonica age 16
• 9:59 Whammer Jammer was the first track that inspired Adam to take up harmonica
• 10:58 Was also learning guitar at the same time and connecting the blues scale and the pitches between the notes that really make the blues
• 11:57 Adam was a self-taught harmonica and guitar player, discovering Nat Riddles as his mentor when he was a little older
• 12:33 Summer school at Berkeley School of Music where he learnt some jazz theory
• 12:57 Stopped playing music for a little while after graduating from college before going to a blues jam in New York age 25
• 14:02 Saw James Cotton opening for the J Geils Band, BB King and Muddy Waters in New York
• 14:44 Adam was part of the famous blues duo: Satan & Adam, and how he discovered Sterling Magee, aka Mr Satan, in October 1986
• 15:44 Adam didn’t know who Sterling Magee was, e.g. that he had played with James Brown and George Benson
• 16:17 The duo made an impact on the streets of Harlem when busking, with the groove the thing
• 16:57 Took a while for Adam to find his place in the duo with Sterling
• 17:36 Busked for four years initially with Sterling, earning other money from teaching harmonica
• 18:02 They weren’t called Satan and Adam until first demo came out
• 18:16 In 1987 The duo were filmed by the rock band U2, briefly appearing in a film and album (Rattle and Hum) from the band
• 20:30 Made first album together in 1991: Harlem Blues, after signing with a high-profile music manager
• 22:00 The album was well received and had a lot of air play on the radio and a WC Handy Award nomination for Best Trad Blues Album
• 22:22 They received some publicity and started to playing in clubs and touring, instead of busking
• 23:16 Touring around US and some internationally
• 23:50 Satan and Adam documentary
• 23:56 The duo dis-banded in 1998 when Sterling became ill, and re-formed later to release another album and Adam released some recordings of them busking in the late 1980s
• 25:12 Adam’s memoirs of that time: Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir
• 25:52 After Satan and Adam, released a solo record Kick and Stomp: playing solo harmonica, vocal and a kick drum
• 27:11 Tracked down a better quality kick drum from Pete Farmer, who created what is now the Seydel Gecko harmonica rack
• 27:33 Adam started his solo project at the same age Sterling was when he first met him
• 29:14 The album received air play on a national radio show: the first solo harmonica to be aired on there
• 29:59 Southbound album, released in 2011, with Adam adding guitar and a few musicians
• 30:23 2012: formed a duo with another university professor: The Blues Doctors
• 30:37 Now joined by the nephew of Sterling Magee: to form Sir Rod and The Blues Doctors
• 31:48 Latest album from Sir Rod and The Blues Doctors is Keep It In The Family
• 33:33 Adam’s YouTube channel, starting 2007, was the first of harmonica tutorial channel on that platform
• 35:11 Has two YouTube channels now, which have had millions of views, but first channel wasn’t monetised
• 36:12 Modern Blues Harmonica website accompanied the first YouTube channel
• 36:40 Created second channel in order to be able to monetise
• 37:19 Records lots of the videos in his car
• 37:39 Son plays several instruments, except harmonica
• 38:15 Modern Blues Harmonica website contains lots of information
• 38:35 Has written six books around blues and harmonica
• 39:37 Subject of latest book: Whose Blues: Facing Up To Race and the Future of Music
• 40:30 Blues is a worldwide phenomena now, partly from US and British military bases
• 41:35 BB King also helped spread the blues around the world
• 42:06 Blues has Senegalese roots
• 43:45 Adam has been involved in numerous harmonica teaching camps
• 44:09 Has played at different festivals around the world
• 44:25 Hoping to tour to Germany in 2023
• 44:52 10 minute question: practise blues scale and licks through middle and upper harp
• 46:50 Uses some custom harmonicas from Joe Spiers but mainly plays stock Marine Bands
• 47:48 Singing
• 48:06 Has played some chromatic, but not really now
• 48:53 What is ‘modern blues harmonica’ partly involves not just playing all the classic Chicago blues songs
• 51:15 Is a Hohner endorsee and plays mainly standard Marine Bands
• 52:13 Overblows: had one lesson with William Galison, who Adam also took over the Big River show harmonica part from too
• 52:28 Adam is part of the popularity of this technique, along with Mike Turk, Carlos del Junco and Jason Ricci
• 53:55 Embouchre: puckers and tongue blocks
• 54:35 Often uses two amplifiers at the same time
• 56:05 Uses a clean vocal mic, and not a bullet mic
• 56:44 Uses a delay pedal as main effect, sometimes reverb, and delay settings
• 57:34 Future plans include teaching a blues literature class (including some harmonica) in Parchment Farm penitentiary, the famous prison in Mississippi

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Adam Guslaw joins me on episode 73. Adam is a native New Yorker now living in Mississippi, working as a professor at the university there. Adam rose to stardom as part of the blues duo Satan and Adam in the late 1980s. They found their audience on the streets of Harlem, where they were briefly filmed and appeared in a U2 documentary and album. Satan and Adam enjoyed great success playing together for 15 years, releasing three albums before disbanding in 1998, reforming some years later and releasing another album. With the passing of Mr. Satan, Adam formed his own one-man band, then a duo which has recently added Mr. Satan's nephew to create Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors. Adam was the first person to release blues tuition videos on YouTube and has had over 20 million hits accompanied by his website Modern Blues Harmonica. This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonica's Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.zeidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zeidel Harmonicas.

UNKNOWN: 1:24

Music

SPEAKER_02: 1:24

Hello, Adam Gusso, and welcome to the podcast. Neil, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. I first heard you when I was in an Oxford Street bookstore in London. I heard an album of Satan and Adam for the first time. I'd never heard of you. It was just in the bookstore, kind of featured, and I listened to it, and it was fantastic. And I always remember you since then. And yeah, so it's great to get you on. How long ago was

SPEAKER_03: 1:48

that? Was that back in the 90s when we were sort of out there playing?

SPEAKER_02: 1:51

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was your third album, I believe, and you just released it. So, yeah, it would have been the early 90s.

SPEAKER_03: 1:56

Yeah, yeah. Actually, the third album, if it was Living on the River, I think came out in 95 or 96. And we toured the UK, of course, briefly back in 91.

SPEAKER_02: 2:08

So starting just about with you. So you were born near New York, just north of New York. So you're a New Yorker.

SPEAKER_03: 2:15

Well, I was actually born in New York City, but we moved to what I call downstate New York, about 20 miles north of the city when I was, I think, less than a year old, three months old. So I think of myself, although I'm literally a New York City native, I think of myself as a small town guy from just up the river a little bit.

SPEAKER_02: 2:32

It's funny because on the podcast, I can't think of anybody offhand who's actually from New York, which is very strange given the, you know, the famousness of the city. You know, so what's the association and what's the blues scene like around New York?

SPEAKER_03: 2:44

Well, you know, it's interesting. I reviewed a book that came out recently called New York City Blues. I can't remember the author's name, but fantastic book that talked about the New York City blues scene in the 20 or 30 years coming after World War II. It had a lot of migrant black Southerners who came up from the South, North Carolina, and a lot of them moved to Harlem or they moved to New York. the other boroughs in the city. When I came along in the early 80s, I met some of those people, people like Bobby Robinson, who recorded James Cotton and Buster Brown and everybody else. He had a record store in Harlem. The blues scene in New York was interesting. I tried in my book, Journeyman's Road, to sort of figure out what made for New York City blues. Some of it's that the people who play it, at least the people that I met in the scene, also sometimes play other kinds of music. So there was an ad mixture of soul. Think about the The Holmes Brothers and Papa Chubby and Shemeika Copeland and Satan and Adam. If you think about the four of us who all sort of overlapped in that late 80s, early 90s period, all of us kind of do more than just blues. The Holmes brothers are doing country music in there and soul and stuff. And we had a lot of funk and even a little bit of kind of rap stuff that Mr. Satan threw in because it was flowing through the streets of New York up in Harlem when we were playing out on the streets. I would say the New York blues sound is, it's hard to identify, but that sense of more than one thing going on at the same time. So it's not, that Chicago groove. It's not Texas piano, the Amos Milburn sound that goes to the West Coast. It comes more off the East Coast, the Piedmont sound a little bit more, but again, with a whole lot of soul and blues and a little bit of rock and roll too.

SPEAKER_02: 4:22

Yeah. So it sounds like it's maybe like a bit more modern, like you're saying maybe the late 80s is obviously blues associated from the 50s and so from Chicago. So a bit more of a modern scene for blues in New York.

SPEAKER_03: 4:34

I think so. But without sort of identifiable styles leaders. I mentioned those four acts I mean, there is a Texas blues sound. There's a Stevie Ray Vaughan sound. There's a sort of Albert Collins kind of thing. There's the B.B. King sound. Well, Freddie King, obviously, coming out of Texas, too. There's Blind Boy Fuller and a sort of Piedmont sound. People can identify. What is the New York sound? There's not kind of one specific sound. But it was a really cool scene. It's calmed down quite a bit now. The club, Terra Blues, that was sort of the upstart club that came in in the early 90s, is like the last club standing. So all the players is that I learned to play and used to gig, especially Dan Lynch and Manny's Car Wash. They're all gone. They've been gone for a

SPEAKER_02: 5:16

while. You now live in Mississippi. Again, strangely, I've talked about Mississippi quite a lot in the last few episodes. It just keeps coming up. Of course, the kind of spiritual home of the blues. So you're a professor now in English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. That's right. Yeah, and you mentioned there that you've written a book, and we'll get onto that later. But you teach courses in American and African American literature, blues tradition, and I do,

SPEAKER_03: 5:41

yeah. 20 years, actually. I just finished putting 20 years here. So I've been doing sort of the blues scholar thing and also the blues musician thing from here, from Mississippi, although as a transplanted New

SPEAKER_02: 5:52

Yorker. So, I mean, what a journey. And we'll go through that. So you studied at Columbia and Princeton, which are Ivy League universities in the US, yeah?

SPEAKER_03: 6:00

That's right. I was actually an undergrad at Princeton many years ago. My great claim to fame as a musician was that I went in having played guitar for about, good God, for about six months. I put on my application that I played electric guitar. My mother was incredulous. She goes, Adam, you've been playing guitar for six months. You can't put that on your application. You know, guitar and harmonica. And yet, by the time I graduated, I was playing guitar in one of the hottest bands on campus. It was a sort of jazz-funk fusion ensemble, a sextet called Spiral. I had one stint at a music school, a famous music school in Boston, one summer. I mean, I enjoyed reading and I enjoyed playing. And usually when I was doing my homework, the guitar would sit there and look mournfully at me. And when I was playing guitar, the books would sit there and scold me. I've always been sort of hamstrung between those two things. And it turns out that I really needed to do both in order to live the life that I was, I guess, put here to live. So, yeah, I was an undergrad there. Then I was at Columbia for a couple of years in the early 80s. After working, I was like a publishing assistant in New York City and used to go out during my lunch hour and watch the buskers. And then many years later, after the whole Satan and Adam thing had gotten well underway, I went back to graduate school again, this time again to Princeton. So I was a graduate student now, not an undergraduate, very different sort of thing. Got a PhD there in the year 2000 with a dissertation on blues music and blues literature and violence, southern violence, which I had paid zero attention to while I was playing with Mr. Satan. Violence was not really a thing I thought about much, but then at a certain point, suddenly in graduate school, I began to say, well, what happens if you actually look at that? And maybe there's songs about it, but there's also was a lot of memoirs in which blues musicians like B.B. King and Manse Lipscomb and Willie Dixon, all the names that people know so well. But Willie Dixon, one reason he left Mississippi for Chicago is because he saw the aftermath of a lynching in Vicksburg. And B.B. King talks about seeing the aftermath of what turned out to be a kind of legal lynching. And B.B. King talks about that incredibly powerful moment in his memoir. And I was fascinated by the fact that while B.B. King doesn't really sing about racial violence, except maybe in the one song, Why I Sing the Blues, which was at a politicized moment in the late 60s, he talked about racial violence in in interviews and how important, how it had sort of shaped his art. There's one interview I found that just, I think it sort of formed the core of my book where he said, so many people have been killed down there where I come from in so many different ways. And he says, and sometimes you start to think about it and it's way back in your mind, but it really hurts you, you know? And he said, and so you try to say what that means. And it comes out in the music. And he said, the next most important thing after that is your woman. And I thought, wait a minute. I thought everybody thinks B.B. King is singing about my baby hurt me, my baby this and that. And yet he's saying that that racial violence is actually in the back of his mind. And that's the foundation of his blues. That was, I wrote my first book, my dissertation book, trying to kind of explain that, trying to make sense of that insight that I felt like I had got gained from him.

SPEAKER_02: 9:11

Your prodigious output, which we're going to go through obviously on this interview here, is obviously you're entrenched in the blues, an incredible amount of research you've done and understanding. Going back to your beginnings of playing the harmonica, so as you say, you were playing guitar, and I think you started playing harmonica about 16, did you? Was it about the same time as you were learning guitar?

SPEAKER_03: 9:44

Yeah, it was the fall. I was a smart whippersnapper, so I was a young senior in high school. I was a 16-year-old, and that fall, for whatever reason, I had begun, I mean, I'd really been loving the music that I heard in school. And I think the first blues harmonica track that really got my attention, that made me say, I'm going to go out today and buy a harmonica and an instruction booklet and learn how to play the dang thing, was Whammer Jammer, the Jay Giles Band instrumental with Magic Dick. And so I went out, I literally went out. It was like executive decision, you know, we are going to learn the harmonica. I had had enough kind of, there was enough in there from all of the boogie woogie 78 RPM discs that my father had had. He had a, he was sort of a jazz record collector. And so I'd gotten a taste of that boogie woogie blues stuff. I think that's why Whammer Jammer called to me because once it gets going, there's a sort of boogie woogie piano and guitar and hot rhythm section. And I And so I taught myself how to play. I mean, I have a recording of me playing it at nine months and it's pretty bad. And yet without any, you know, instruction booklets were useless. You do the old fashioned way. We played it at normal speed and again and again and again, lifting the needle off the record. And I learned how to play enough of that. But that wasn't the only thing. blues that interested me. At the same time I was playing guitar, I was learning the magic of bent notes. And of course, guitar and harmonica work exactly the opposite from each other. They both have bent notes, but in the guitar, you squeeze, let's say a minor third up a quarter tone to get that bluesy, muddy watersy kind of sound or B.B. King sound. On the harmonica, you pull the note down a little bit. It was immensely helpful to realize that the instruction books that I had that said, here's the blue scale with that minor third and And that flat seventh, you know, I sort of learned the scale degrees. I learned what they were called, but I knew that the minor third alone wasn't it. There was some other magic. And it was that those intermediate pitches that very early were the thing that really actually called to me. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one there. They're that blues

SPEAKER_02: 11:56

difference. I think you took up with your sort of mentor was a Nat Riddles there in New York.

SPEAKER_03: 12:13

So the important thing here is that he came along 10 years later. Okay. So I was a self-taught harmonica and guitar player with the exception of like one lesson that I took on guitar with a guy who graduated from Princeton in the class of 75, a few years before me. But otherwise I was self-taught playing jazz and funk guitar. Didn't really have a personal teacher, although I went to the Berkeley College of Music for a summer term in jazz guitar for seven weeks. When I was 20, and that made a huge difference in teaching me something about jazz harmony and helping me understand so I could talk to musicians and think about chord tones and extensions and all that. It's really shaped my playing. It's made sort of a difference. But I didn't have a harmonica teacher for a long time. And I put the music away. when I graduated from college in 1980 and really didn't do much with it until 83, 84. 83 was when I first... I'm sure there's people in your audience who, when you're in a long-term relationship and it begins to go sour and it's going to end, although you don't know that yet, but you feel it. I mean, blues is particularly good, I think, at conducting that feeling and purging that feeling. And it kind of calls to you because it knows all about that condition of, will she or won't she? Down on the killing floor, that kind of incredible, tense... Are we back together or is it all going down? And that's when I first hauled my guitar and the amp that I had at that point down and harmonicas down to Dan Lynch, a blues bar that I'd found a little ad for. They had a jam session. And that was like the first time that I was sort of actually playing with, listening to and playing with in a blues club setting. And that was 83. How old were you then? Well, I was born in 58, so I would have been 25. Prior to that, I mean, I saw James Cotton opening for the Jay Giles Band when I been playing for about nine months, which was the first time I'd seen actual live blues musicians up close. And it was astonishing. That, as much as anything, got me hooked on the harp. I saw B.B. King once live in Central Park. Again, astonishing, like when you see him live for the first time and you're right up front. I saw Muddy Waters once with, I think, Mike Bloomfield. They were both playing solo in New York City. But other than that, very little real, legit blues. And it wasn't until I started going to the club in New York and then seeing that sort of lower level kind of club level stuff. It's still very good and real where I suddenly got kind of hooked again.

SPEAKER_02: 14:43

And so you, you're part of a, you know, one of the great traditions of blues duels and one of the most famous ones, Satan and Adam, as you've mentioned. So you discovered Sterling McGee as his real name is, Satan, when you were, you know, you were in Harlem. Was it, you know, not long after this time you were starting to check out the acts again while you were starting to, you know, get more interested in blues going around Harlem. You saw him playing.

SPEAKER_03: 15:05

Yeah, it was a couple of years later and I'd been a busker. I'd played with a number of guitar players at that point. I'd been over to England and to Europe. And it was after that period of a couple of years when I was doing quite a bit of busking that I drove through Harlem and saw him and got a chance to play with him, having paid a fair share of dues.

SPEAKER_02: 15:23

I think your first song with him was Mojo, I read. Is that the first one you bussed

SPEAKER_03: 15:32

with him on the street?

SPEAKER_02: 15:53

And then he decided to go busking on the streets because he didn't really like, you know, the whole music industry. So he decided he just wanted to just play on the street. And so you just sort of took up with him because he sounded good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 16:04

Yeah. I mean, he was, you know, if you're a young harmonica player like me and you run into an incredible guitar player with an incredible groove and an original sound, and he likes your, you know, he likes your playing. He likes your presence. He recognizes, and you both recognize that this is a great busking kind of thing. We, you know, we, the traffic would stop dead when we were playing. It was really quite, it was quite amazing. Having done a lot of busking, I could appreciate that this was something that like I could really learn from him. And of course, the lanyap, I guess was, I was playing, you know, on the street in front of a black audience. So if I could, if I could get their attention and get their approval, if they like what I was doing, I could, and that's what I learned really quick is that people were uninterested in having me show off. They just, but, but if the moment you kind of really groove together, then everybody would stop. And they, so the groove was the thing. I think that's what

SPEAKER_02: 16:53

I learned.

SPEAKER_03: 17:23

By the time we went into the studio to record in early 1990, the recordings that became part of our first release, Harlem Blues, at that point, I think I'd kind of found my sound, but it took a

SPEAKER_02: 17:34

while. And so you were busking, I think, for four years on the streets, yeah? So at this stage, were you working or was this just a kind of part-time thing or were you earning enough money to be able to live from it?

SPEAKER_03: 17:45

Yeah, it was kind of a little bit of here and there. I did not have a full-time job. I was teaching at a I was doing a bit of freelance work, kind of freelance editorial work here and there. And we would play an occasional club gig. But the key thing to understand is we were not called Satan and Adam until our first demo came out in the spring of 1990. We were just Mr. Satan and that white boy who plays with him up by the phone company. I mean, that's how people would talk about us.

SPEAKER_02: 18:16

A famous event that occurred for you is that you were filmed by U2, the Irish rock band, who were obviously pretty massive. So you were filmed and you were playing a song called Freedom for My People and that was taken and included in part of the Rattle and Hum YouTube documentary and also album, only a short clip. I don't think you ever met them or anything, but that kind of did give you some exposure. Did that sort of help get your name more on the map? I think it

SPEAKER_03: 18:41

did. Of course, it had nothing to do with blues. The song, it's a wonderful song and it was Sterling's or Mr. Satan's, as I called him back then, Mr. Satan's, his composition. You know, they had a film crew with them. I guess they were doing sort of a swing through America. They were obviously huge in the summer of 1987, which is when they came by. They had filmed, I still haven't found what I'm looking for, like with a Harlem choir. They were just like walking out on the street and we happened to be playing. I didn't know who they were. I didn't even know that they'd actually been there until they were gone. And then somebody said, do you know who those guys were? I'm like, what guys? And then they said, well, that's you too. And I thought, well, aren't they like a rock group, right? They were, of course, like the most famous rock group in the world, I think, at that point. They were really big. There was a sort of deal that was made between Bobby Robinson, who was Mr. Satan's kind of de facto manager. And Bobby, you know, I think took the card. They used like literally 40 seconds, 39 seconds of that song in the film. I don't know what effect it had. Certainly, you know, when I finally got a chance to go into the movie theater and see the film, it was amazing to have that, even that little bit of effect. little bit. It wasn't representative of what we were doing. In other words, we were really playing groove-oriented blues. And that particular song... I mean, we ended up recording it at full length. In 1990, we did and released it in 93. When I wrote my memoir, Mr. Satan's Apprentice, I transcribed the full length version and put those lyrics in the book. So if somebody's interested, they can go to Mr. Satan's Apprentice.

SPEAKER_02: 20:27

And so this happened in 87, but you made your first album together. in 91, Harlem Blues, yeah. And also, so I think you'd sort of signed to a manager and you went and toured with Bo Diddley in the UK. So you still were busking for a few years and then you made this album, did the tour in 91.

SPEAKER_03: 20:45

Yeah, the album was made at two sessions about a year apart in February of 90 and February of 91. And it was when we were doing that second session, that's when Margot Lewis came along. And she was huge. She was a talent consultant International. She managed Bo Diddley and Wilson Pickett and the Village People. She saw us in a women's bar down in Greenwich Village where we had a sort of curious 3 to 6 p.m. gig on Sunday evenings. And she happened to wander in and loved it, loved us and gave us her card. We took a while to convince Sterling that he wanted to kind of accept management and accept having a record out there. But I still remember the day that I played our CD or I played, I think, the demo that we did after the that first session i remember sitting with him with my with my little honda the doors wide open in harlem on the street like with the stereo cranking our music and it was and just saluting like drinking a little vodka and thinking man we got it what a sound you know because you play on the street you don't know people would make recordings and videos but he was singing through a ratty old couple of little mouse amps and you couldn't really hear his vocals as well suddenly there we are with studio level with the vocals right on top

SPEAKER_01: 22:00

yeah

SPEAKER_03: 22:00

what i i'll say is that to have get to get that record out and then to get the responses that we got from the djs let's just say they really really loved that first album

SPEAKER_02: 22:10

yeah i mean it was nominated for a wc handy award yeah for best traditional blues album of the year so yeah

SPEAKER_03: 22:16

yeah

SPEAKER_02: 22:16

it felt new i think to them they fit there wasn't you know it was just a very

SPEAKER_03: 22:20

different kind of sound it was an original sound

SPEAKER_02: 22:22

by this stage 91 you were you still busking or were you playing in clubs you know around new york

SPEAKER_03: 22:27

then that's a great question we started to play in clubs in new york in in 90 after the demo came out. We began to play little restaurants and stuff, but nothing really big. Margo then began to put us out there. And there was an article when the album came out, a big cover story in the entertainment section of Newsday, which is a pretty big New York City paper. People began to see that, people in Harlem too. And so Sterling said, yeah, I think the money's not quite as good out here because people think, well, y'all are making it now. You don't need my nickels and dimes. We kind of evolved. We liked playing the street, but I think when we realized there was a market for us away from the street and in the clubs and then off on the road, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 23:05

So you released three albums through the 90s, Jan. We talked about Living on the River, which contains Unlucky in Love, which I absolutely love that song. I'm glad you like it. So yes, you did three albums together. And by this time, you were touring more and you started touring more around the US and internationally as well through the 90s.

SPEAKER_03: 23:23

Yeah, internationally, we did it here and there. We went to Finland twice. We went to the Guinness Temple Bar Blues Festival at one point in Dublin. So we didn't do a lot of international stuff. We got to Canada and we got out to the West Coast once or twice. I used to call us a regional to national touring act. We would get in my car and we would go up and down the East Coast, occasionally go out to Chicago. We played a lot of festivals in New York, in America, but mostly east of the Mississippi for the most part.

SPEAKER_02: 23:50

You mentioned the Satan and Adam documentary, which I watched myself last week and it's fantastic. So touching on some of the things that happened. So you guys kind of disbanded in 98 when the sterling became ill and you you had a bit of an illness yourself yeah and then and then you guys came back together and it's a really touching story in the documentary where sterling was really quite you know he looked like he couldn't play anymore and then certainly he rediscovers his mojo it's like amazing isn't it he kind of like gets it back and it really seems to help him recover so i really um people check that out it's really a heart heartwarming story but so then and then you recorded two more albums later on yeah when you sort of got back in around in the sort of 2011 and i'm trying to think we We had one called Back in the Game. Yeah. I think I'm thinking of your word on the street, which is the one where you got recordings of live performances on the street.

SPEAKER_03: 24:40

Right. So those are recordings from 1989, just before we went in the studio. So if somebody wants to know, what did it really feel like to be there on the street playing with them?

UNKNOWN: 24:58

Hey, hey, hey, hey.

SPEAKER_02: 25:02

That's just a download. I don't sell that as a disc. So that's available through your website, as are most of your albums. And so, yeah, people can get in touch.

SPEAKER_03: 25:11

Neil, I do want to say one thing. If somebody wants the full backstory, they really need to get a hold of my memoir. And there's also an audiobook version. I actually read the entire thing, which is called Mr. Satan's Apprentice. It's spelled M-I-S-T-E-R. And that's out there as a book and as an audiobook. If you have that, then you've got the full thing. Here's a

SPEAKER_02: 25:31

quick word from the podcast sponsor, Blows Me Away Productions.

SPEAKER_00: 25:37

Hey folks, this is Charlie Musselwhite. If you're in the amplified tone like I am, the best and only place to start is a microphone from Blows Me Away Productions. Check them out at blowsmeaway.com. You know I ain't lying.

SPEAKER_02: 25:52

So after Satan and Adam, I think in 2010, then you decided to release your own kind of solo one-man band album called Kick and Stomp, which clearly you were building on all the experience you'd had playing with Sterling and playing on the street and the kind of busking kind of vibe that you get in the album. It's a really good album. I think it comes out really well and building on that big tradition of, you know, one-man band harmonica. You're playing harmonica and kind of a foot stomping pedal and singing, yeah?

SPEAKER_03: 26:22

Yeah. And I have to say, for all the years that I played with Sterling, as the harmonica playing sideman to a one-man band, it never once occurred to me that I wanted to play the percussion and try to do what he was doing. And what happened was that I was friends with a harmonica player who I met through YouTube. He commented on a video of mine, and he's a young guy named Brandon Bailey. Brandon ended up giving me kind of a primitive stomp box. He said, I've been doing this stuff involving harmonica and beatboxing. Here's something you might like. And he said, me a little present basically i plugged it into an amp and stomped on it i didn't like the sound but the the fact of having a groove and then when i would play harmonica along with it really suddenly called to something in me and and now i in retrospect i realized it was like i was i was adding the little mr satan to my harmonica mix and of course i i would groove to that sound i very quickly tracked down a kick drum made by a guy named pete farmer

SPEAKER_02: 27:16

this is the same pete farmer who who made the harmonica right which uh side will sell now yeah

SPEAKER_03: 27:21

i maybe i I don't know. I actually don't know. So in the summer of 2009, I called Pete and he said, well, let me send you something here. Let's try this out. And that transformed my playing. It was like a rebirth. Interestingly enough, so 2009, I would have been 51. That was like right at the age that Sterling was when I ran into him. He was 50. So it was like the same age, 50-year-old, where you feel like you're a kid again as a musician doing something brand new But in my case, it was also very old. It was very... Now, the percussion setup that I played, totally different than his. So again, he was using two hi-hat cymbals, tacked sort of strapped down to a wooden board. I was using a kick drum and a tambourine pedal. So totally different setup. You're not wrong to say there's some weird resonance. And I could hear him in my head as I began to learn how the percussion thing worked. And if I didn't get it right at first, I would try something and I him in my head because when I ran into him, he wasn't playing two hi-hat cymbals on a wooden board. He was playing one hi-hat cymbal that was like right on the concrete. And it was while I was playing with him about six months after we started playing together back in early 87 that he got the second hi-hat cymbal. And I remember him talking about how hard it was to sort of do these two things at the same time. He would say like, man, it feels like your feet be getting drunk. So I had this inner guide with him, all that experience with him. And that made huge difference. And so in the summer of 2010, I said, I'm going to record a solo album. And it was just vocals, amplified harp and percussion. And then I would joke with the guy who was my recording engineers, like in 16 and a half percent reverb, you know, we would argue about how much reverb would fill it in just the right amount so that we didn't need anything else behind it. And I did an album with 13 or 14 cuts. I sent them out. At some point, somebody said, Adam, you realize they're playing you on Bluesville. He goes, it's like a national blues show and he said you're the first solo harmonica player he said I think except for Russ Green that they've ever played on that show you know it's Bill Wax so I have huge thanks to give to a particular blues DJ Bill Wax who's a legend who you know not only played the album but he invited me into the studio when I was in Washington DC the next summer and so that reanimated my career that album

SPEAKER_02: 29:42

great it's a great album and I love Sunshine of Your Love on there

SPEAKER_01: 29:54

light shining through on you i'm with you

SPEAKER_02: 29:59

So you released another album called Southbound, which was, you had a few more instruments join you on that one, so it wasn't quite solo. I played

SPEAKER_03: 30:07

guitar. In fact, I played a lot of guitar kind of in the background, and then I had a couple of different bass players. So yeah, I thought, well, what would happen if we now, now that we've stripped it down, that was the first album, what happens if we record everything as stripped down, and then I add other things in after the fact? And that's how it was recorded. It was one man band at first. And then you

SPEAKER_02: 30:23

joined a duo with a guitar player called Alan Gross, who's also a professor and a teacher. Yeah, it's kind of hard to

SPEAKER_03: 30:53

believe. Chris, just before Christmas in 2019, just before the pandemic roared in, I got an email from a guy He said, hi, my name is Rod Patterson. He goes, I'm Mr. Satan's nephew. He said, I saw the documentary. I loved it. He goes, why don't we get together? He goes, I can sing my uncle's song. I can sing Satan and Adam's song. Why don't we get together and maybe do a demo and put together a show of some kind? I was very dubious at first. I thought, well, Alan and I are not your typical blues band. I don't know how much experience this guy has. Can this work? Well, it did. And we got together in January of that year. And then in February to finish it, we Basically, we made an album in a couple of sessions. And it's been a wonderful ride. Totally unforeseeable. And yet, and he's nothing like his uncle in terms of what he does. I mean, except there's a McGee thing that he's got. It's a charisma, I think. He's an incredibly charismatic guy, like

SPEAKER_02: 31:47

his uncle. Yeah, so your latest album is called Keep It In The Family. This has got a song in it called Brother Sterling, which Rod's singing about Sterling, isn't he? And making, again, that connection

SPEAKER_01: 31:56

back to that. Well,

SPEAKER_03: 32:08

he's singing about Sterling, and there's a specific interesting thing that really is at the heart of Rod's connection with me, which is that I met his uncle in 1986, but between 80 and 82, Sterling, at that point, who had become Mr. Satan, was living with Rod and his mom, Sterling's sister. He had this sort of close-up and personal connection with his uncle. the way, you know, a version of it. It wasn't as musical. And yet Sterling would play house parties. And so that's what Brother Sterling's about. It's about being a young man, young Rod, and having this crazy, incredible musical uncle living in the house. And his mother would sort of have these house parties and Sterling would play. Here's the line that I came up with for this song. Alan, it was really in the pocket for Alan and me. This is on an A-harp.

SPEAKER_01: 32:56

A-harp bye bye

SPEAKER_03: 33:18

You know, I had Slim Harpo and, you know, I don't know who else I had in mind, but I wanted something very sort of strong and full and heavily groove-oriented. And so that's what that song is.

SPEAKER_02: 33:31

Touching on now some of the other things you've done. So we've got to talk about your YouTube channel. When you made your first YouTube video back in 2007, I believe, which was called Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed, I think you may have been the first person, certainly to come to prominence at least, with these, you know, YouTube harmonica tuition videos. Do you think that is the case? I do think

SPEAKER_03: 33:53

it's the case. I can tell you, because before I did that first one, I made a pretty, well, I think thorough sort of attempt to figure out what else was out there. And so John Gindick had a channel called Jam Camp 06. You know, he'd strum and play rack harp. There wasn't a whole lot of lesson kind of stuff. And Ronnie Shellist, who would become a good friend of mine, had a lesson, he would just sort of play along with a jam track. That remains a legend, I think, among harmonica players, that particular video. There was, you know, James Cotton in a blue t-shirt, sweating really heavily playing. There was, you know, a handful of sort of stage stuff, Sonny Boy Williamson, a couple of clips that people could find. But if you were to go back, I was February of 2007. go back and just look at timestamps, you'll find there's very little

SPEAKER_02: 34:52

out there. I think, I mean, I certainly remember, you know, you, and it was quite a sensation at the time. And I, you know, I watched your videos back then and it was like, wow, yeah, you can get this instruction on the internet. You know, it was like a new thing. Yeah. Which, you know, now when it's just absolutely flooded with it, you know, right. So you kind of got in there first year, which put you in a, you know, in a great position and your, your YouTube channel now has had like 20 million views. You've got 70,000 subscribers, you know? So what was the whole YouTube, uh, journey like for you?

SPEAKER_03: 35:20

Well, now it's interesting because I've got two channels and the original channel has 70 to 80,000. I might even have 85 at this point, but the newer channel that I started in 2015 has like 157,000 subscribers, I believe. What it's been like actually is when I started, there was no such thing as monetization and nothing commercial about it. It was strictly prohibited. So I used a whole bunch of copyrighted music. I'd put on Herbie Hancock's CD, Taken Off, and then I'd play along. I I do four videos about how to play Watermelon Man, for example. So I did all the things that are not best practices if you want to be monetized, because nobody was thinking in terms of monetization. You couldn't make money off YouTube, right? Now we talk about YouTubers like it's always been like that, but it wasn't like that. So it really was, when I said I'm going to give it all away, I had zero ulterior motive in terms of trying to profit from it. What I did was I started a website called Modern Blues Harmonica that I intended to last for 10 days with a PayPal icon on it and then I was going to kill it because people, after I did the free videos for 40 days, people said, we want to give you a tip. You know, we want to send you tips. It's like, really? I kept that website and it's still up and I still have$5 videos and$2 tab sheets. I have not raised my price since 2007. Not many people can make that thing. But the YouTube thing, what happened was ultimately I was disabled from monetization. And so I watched the thing grow up 2010, 2013, 14. And I finally said, well, wait a minute, I need to start fresh. I need to start another channel. I need to monetize from the beginning. I need to make sure that I don't play along with lots of copyrighted music. Let me just do my own thing. I know how to do this. I've learned how to do it. And so I started a new channel and bit by bit, it gained viewers. That's where all of the things that I upload go there.

SPEAKER_02: 37:19

thing you did back then which was uh you certainly touched me is that you used to do a lot of your videos in the car so uh you had this real kind of uh you know thing in the car i still do that i did that the other day yeah i'm still i like my car different car i think it's at that time because your your son was the baby and you needed to just get out the house and so it was quiet and things yeah

SPEAKER_03: 37:39

you know it's really strange my kid was an infant he is 16 now and tomorrow we're driving him down he plays a whole bunch of instruments he plays every instrument except except harmonica He's utterly uninterested, but he's really a euphonium player right now. I don't know if people know what that is, but it's like a tenor tuba. He's an incredible musician. He's national class on the euphonium, playing everything but blues. So you're not playing with him then? No, but he can play electric bass. And so once or twice, he's played along with Alan and me. I think in the future, there may be a Sir Robson of Blues Doctors bass player, but we'll see. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02: 38:15

So you mentioned your Modern Blues Harmonica website there, which as you say, started at about the same time and it's a great website great source of information there's tons of stuff on there stuff about you stuff about blues and some great videos of great players and albums so all sorts of stuff on there so that's a really good resource as well for people to check out again put the link on to that we touched on obviously you're a professor now professor of the blues and you've written I think is it five books now I

SPEAKER_03: 38:41

think it's five or six I wrote Mr. Satan's Apprentice was sort of the first one of the memoir in the late 90s and then a dissertation book called Seems Like Murder Here, Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. I did one called Journeyman's Road, Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's, Mississippi to Post 911, New York. I self-published a first novel that it's called Busker's Holidays, wildly fictionalized version of my transformation from first round graduate student to busker in Europe one summer. And then the last couple of books, there was a study called Beyond the Crossroads, The Devil and the Blues Tradition. And then Who's blues facing up to race and the future of the music i think that's six

SPEAKER_02: 39:25

clearly this is something you're passionate about you know you talked at the beginning about you know the links to you know kind of racial injustice and the blues and you know the fact that we are um uh you know we're appropriating the blues music all these white guys you know so um well

SPEAKER_03: 39:38

i don't i don't my book whose blues is not really about cultural appropriation that's not a phrase that i use very much i mean i'm

SPEAKER_02: 39:44

uh

SPEAKER_03: 39:45

What I'm trying to do is understand some of the complaints that were out there. I was interested in the fact that the conversation about blues had become heavily ideologized and not really productive. And what I meant by that was that it felt like when we talked about the blues, not as aficionados, but sort of arguing about the blues, that people fell into two camps very quickly. One was sort of blues is black music. There was a sort of almost a black nationalist take on the blues. And anything white folks have to do with it is just trouble. And the second one was sort of no black, no white, just the blues, which I thought I understood the idea that it was a sort of one nation or one world under the blues. It's a big tent. But I also thought that there were problems with it. And I thought that what people were missing was the real story, which is that if Americans think the blue story is about a tension between black and white, they're missing the global blue story. I actually did a long article that was a sort of attempt to understand the way in which blues music had gone around the world. And here's something for your UK audience. There were a couple of things that became really important. One thing that was clear is that to the extent that blues is now a world music, that it's spread to South America, to East Asia, to all sorts of places, that the British blues guys, the blues rock guys, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, were a key part of spreading it. The UK had all all these military bases around the world. And there were a lot of people that I found when I began to look country by country who would say, well, you know, we heard these radio shows coming off the English military bases.

SPEAKER_02: 41:23

Oh, well, I didn't realize that, you know, because I obviously know about the 60s blues boom, but I didn't realize they picked it up from American radio bases from the States. American and

SPEAKER_03: 41:31

British, yes. American and British military bases were one of the places. Now, B.B. King was also crucial because he toured the world. So, you know, King goes to China only once really late. And China's blues scene is not particularly big, although they do have one. But he goes to Japan in, I think, 68. And Japan was like the number three place that he toured. It was quite remarkable. And Japan has a thriving blues scene. But it's really not just about black and white. It's not just about America. Blues has traveled widely. And the question is why? What is it about the music that makes it so open in that way? And it may have something to do with its Senegalese roots. Senegal was... was a place that traders came through. It was heavily Islamicized and there were a lot of people sort of moving through. And I think Senegalese music, which worked its way into the blues, it worked its way into the hoodoo and mojo kind of language that is part of the blues vocabulary. It's a long story, obviously, but I try to get at a lot of the complexities. And one of my mottos here is sort of always look for the bad facts. Look for the facts that don't quite fit. So for example, there was a moment Yeah. moment i don't need to tell people how what a transformation happened you guys like blues breakers um you brought the music to back to america you know in a

SPEAKER_02: 43:18

form that certainly galvanized me so you got six books available all available for your website yeah and on other sources as well i tell amazon amazon uk and other places yeah so great yeah so check them out you know fantastic i've had a look through and i intend to read some more so

UNKNOWN: 43:40

Bye.

SPEAKER_02: 43:45

you've been involved in teaching obviously you said you taught in new york you've taught in some of john gindick's camps and you you teach at some hill country harmonica teaching camp in mississippi is that still running uh no it's not but

SPEAKER_03: 43:57

i've done yeah i've done a lot of different i mean i did 10 of gindick's camps i did like half a dozen workshops with ronnie shellist i put on four or five hill country harmonica things

SPEAKER_02: 44:09

and you're still traveling you played at festivals you played at the uh the mund harmonica live festival in klingenthal that's a Seidel one, isn't it? A Seidel festival. Yeah. Yeah. You played at the one in Edinburgh and the NHL festival in 2017. So you've been in the UK. So you're still doing some traveling around.

SPEAKER_03: 44:25

Yeah. I'm hoping, Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors are very much hoping to get over to Germany in 2023. We've got a guy in Metman who's interested in bringing us. And we've just got a new, we've got a booking agent, finally, a top quality blues booking agent. So I have great hopes that you'll see us in the UK.

UNKNOWN: 44:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 44:44

Break it down.

SPEAKER_02: 44:52

Yeah. So a question I ask each time, Adam, related to teaching is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_03: 45:00

Well, I can tell you that I'm going to do it by, I'm going to do it by taking out three harps and showing somebody what I would do. One of the things that I think you should do every day, I'm going to take an A, a C and an E flat just for the heck of it, is you should play the blue scale. You should play it up and down and you should certainly make sure that that three draw, the blue third, as I call it, that you get that right. You should make that blue scale sound I'm good, so I might.

SPEAKER_01: 45:23

And

SPEAKER_03: 45:34

once I can get it on the A. Just making sure that those pitches, here's an E flat. Of course, you could hear that I pulled a little vibrato in at the end, but I think, especially for developing players, it's not obvious to developing players that each harp, on each harp, the bent notes, the blue notes, or every note, it's going to require maybe a slightly different mouth shape, just very subtle kind of movements that will give you the best sound. So like the one hole on an A harp, if you don't know that, if you do know that, So learning how to drop the job so that when you're on a gig and you change harps, every harp sounds right. So that would be something that would make sense to do every day. I also think playing harp, although I do use an occasional custom harp courtesy of Joe Spires, I play mostly stock Kona Marine bands. And I do think it's important to develop a certain amount of lip strength. So I try to do runs. I have a couple. I'll take a C harp, for example. C harp. Now I haven't warmed up. And I would start slow. Find something that will move you through the middle of the harp. I think that's a big weakness. Not only do most players not play the high notes melodically, anything that gets you doing that, even boogie woogie. That's what I would do. I think a lot of players don't know how to move melodically through the middle, up and down with, say, the sixth blow as the note in the middle. Just learning how to move through that register. I would say that that's something every day would make a sense to do. So singing-wise,

SPEAKER_02: 47:49

you do sing on some of your later

SPEAKER_01: 47:50

albums. You

SPEAKER_02: 48:03

know, so singing is obviously something that you've done as well. And you also do play some chromatic, certainly on your albums with the Blues Doctors, I found you playing some chromatic. Is that quite a recent thing

SPEAKER_03: 48:27

for you? Have you been chromatic for a

SPEAKER_02: 48:28

long time?

SPEAKER_03: 48:29

Oh, I'm embarrassed to say that although I did play them on those albums, I've kind of given that up. So I don't feel like I'm much of a chromatic player now. I kind of went through a phase. I still have ambitions to do Stevie Wonder, you know, Fingertips or one of those Stevie Wonder Stomp Down kind of things, Harmonica Man. But yeah, I don't really do much chromatic. No. I play chromatically on the Marine Band, obviously, on the diatonic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 48:53

And so another thing, obviously, your website's called Modern Blues Harmonica. And You touched on it there, of overblows. So, you know, what do you define as a modern blues harmonica player?

SPEAKER_03: 49:03

Well, I certainly think overblows are a part of it. But I also think that relating, how you relate to the repertoire. I think that, unfortunately, there are a number of players who imagine that the repertoire begins and ends with what the Chicago blues guys did. This is why something like Rockin' Robin by Rod Piazza is so interesting.

UNKNOWN: 0:00

.

SPEAKER_03: 49:26

his approach there was to take a rock and roll song now it was still from the classic 50s 60s period but he was responding creatively to all that music out there that you know guys like little walter responded creatively to i came up with a version of superstition so There's this repertoire, this funk repertoire from the 70s. There's music in the 80s, Earth, Wind& Fire. I mean, that's what... contemporary blues players, if they're looking backward, they shouldn't look backward to 1950s Chicago and 1960s LA, I mean, Hollywood. They should be, that's too retro for me. We need to get something new into the mix because that's what the guys back then were doing. Because what we think of now as retro was in fact kind of hip and modern then. And Little Walter was very much a style leader in that respect. He was listening to Joe Liggins doing Honey Dripper, and then he turned it into the Evan Shuffle. I mean, you can find those sorts of appropriations, taking jazz stuff and putting it in. So I think that's part of what it means to be a modern player is to be listening and going, Uptown Funk. I wonder what the harmonica version of Uptown Funk would be, right? And just asking that question begins to get you into some interesting places.

SPEAKER_02: 50:51

And you do play quite a range of, you know, styles on your albums, play some jazz songs and, you know, like you say, some modern takes and some funky stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 50:59

Grazing in the Grass, for example, right? Hugh Masekela, Grazing in the Grass, which I'm proud of, that particular version.

UNKNOWN: 0:00

...

SPEAKER_02: 51:12

So talking specifically through gear now, so you've already mentioned there that you're playing honours and you're a honour and Dorsey, yeah?

SPEAKER_03: 51:18

Yes, for a long time. I am strictly a marine band guy. I mean, I've tried Special 20s, I've tried Golden Melodies, I've tried a couple of others. None of them really do it for me like the marine band. So I'm actually very, in that respect, kind of conventional, I guess.

SPEAKER_02: 51:32

Which type of marine band do you like these days? Is there several available?

SPEAKER_03: 51:36

Well, I just use the stock marine band. Occasionally, honour will set them up a little bit for me, but to make the four or five and six overblows play a little better. But just the model 1896, I don't. Occasionally I'll play a Marine Band custom. I like the G. I've sometimes had a hard time with the straight out of the box Marine Band Gs, but the Marine Band customs I do better with.

SPEAKER_02: 51:57

Yeah, great. And so we touched on overblows. So you are an overblow player. Did you

SPEAKER_03: 52:02

have some lessons with Howard Levy earlier on? Never did. I never did. I had a lesson and it was one crucial lesson with my friend William Gallison who had actually learned from me. from Howard. And so in the fall of 87, not long before I took over the Big River chair from William, that was his sub in Big River. He showed me how to do the overblow just on a marine band. And of course, as a great chromatic player, he knew exactly how to use them. I was, I can say with some confidence, I've gone and tried to research it, that I was one of the first players to make overblows, certainly to record overblows as part of a sort of fairly straightforward amplified blues thing. Mike Turk had done a little bit of that Howard was doing jazz at that point but Carlos Del Junco and I were both kind of in the late 80s early 90s and that's when I met Carlos it was like oh my god there's somebody else now I didn't know about that Mike Turk had done a few things back then but Mike was not really a straight ahead amplified blues player I was in that respect I was more conventional yeah

SPEAKER_02: 53:02

so you're using them as you're saying in more in the blues setting you know you know obviously you do do some jazzy stuff but it's more about putting them into fitting them into a blues idiom

SPEAKER_03: 53:10

yeah and I never went I never did the The Howard thing of sort of switching keys around. I mean, so Carlos took them much further in that respect. But I would say that I kind of, Chris McCulloch came along and began to do them, the late Chris McCulloch. And then Jason Ritchie, who I knew, he took them and he sort of took them to a whole different level and sustained them and bent them. And I couldn't really do that. I guess I'm part of that, the great chain of being that sort of helps begin to get them into circulation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 53:38

Well, I think that's a good approach for a lot of people who are blues players, right? Which is most harmonica players, right? You know, it's a good approach, like you're saying there, to be able to throw some overblows into, you know, a kind of blues song to get the notes you need. The Sunshine of Your Love being a great example of that, needing the overblow on the four blow there to get that missing note. And so what about your embouchure? Do you like to tongue block or pucker or anything else? I

SPEAKER_03: 53:58

do both. And I've had a lot of, you know, I've had some scuffles with Dennis Grunling about this. He and Joe Felisco will tell you that, you know, you've got a full-time tongue block. And then I'll say, well, but there's some things that you can't, it's hard to do some of the things. that Magic Dick does with... I can't really do them terribly well, but the sort of high-powered clarinet-style stuff that Magic Dick can do on Whammer Jammer with tongue blocking. So I do both. So absolutely, when I'm doing runs that involve overblows, it's strictly lip-pursing. But I will switch back and forth really quickly

SPEAKER_02: 54:34

Talking about equipment then. So amplifiers, there's a great list of amplifiers you've used on your website again, which, you know, is a good insight to people what amps they might want to use. And you've got some advice on there. But you kind of famously use two amps, right? Is that something you still do?

SPEAKER_03: 54:48

Yeah, that started really when I was playing on the street in Harlem and Sterling had two amps for a guitar. So I got a pair of mouses, not just one mouse. So I was using two little solid state five watt amps on the street. And then what happened is when we went indoors to play clubs... When I would play with a band, I wouldn't use two amps. But when I would play with Sterling, I kind of wanted parity. So I used two amps. And I think one of the things that happened is I learned over the years with him that smaller was better. I mean, there was a point early on where even in club gigs, I would bring like a Fender Bassman, you know, and something else. It was like too much. So yes, I still use when I'm playing now with in most contexts, I try to use a pair of amps, partly because if you have a smaller amp and a larger amp, you can always turn the smaller amp on. up into operating range and then mic it. And then the larger amp can be sort of your stage volume. It sort of fills in the sound. If you're on an outdoor stage, you can crank it up all the way as far as you want. But if you're indoors, you can go a little bit lower. When I'm playing club gigs, when I'm on the road with Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors, I actually bring a pair of five watt amps and then a 12 watt amp. And so for the smaller club gigs, the smaller amps work just fine. And in fact, Come Together was recorded. In fact, I think both albums were recorded entirely on that pair of 5-watt amps.

SPEAKER_02: 56:05

And microphone-wise, you like to use a clean microphone, like a Shure microphone, yeah?

SPEAKER_03: 56:09

I do. I have a Shure from the late 70s, early 80s. It's called a PE5H or Hi-Z, high impedance. Not your standard harp player's mic. What I like about it is it's fairly clean and yet it overdrives really well in these small tube amps. So for me, it turned out that that was what works best, was the combination of a fairly clean mic with a fairly good output, but it's not like a harp mic. It gives a sound that you can recognize my sound. It's not like a green bullet. When I play in a static, I just don't quite sound

SPEAKER_02: 56:42

like me. And effects wise, you like your delay pedal, yeah, but you don't use too much else.

SPEAKER_03: 56:47

That's all I use. Yeah. At one point years ago, I used a little bit of a flanger occasionally on some songs. I think Sterling gave it to me and I gave him my MXR. I had an old phase shifter pedal, but yeah, all I use just digital delay or analog delay. And occasionally I have a from mere reverb tank. And I've used that from time to time, but not a lot. Usually just the pedal. And what I try to do is I try to get about 400 milliseconds. So it's not quite half a second, but it's a fairly long delay. It's not a quick rockabilly slapback. And then I try to get not a terribly high level, but a fair bit of repetition. So like five or six repeats, but not a high volume. And if you get those right, if you get that dialed in right, it opens up the sound and it feels more like a reverb. It doesn't feel like a slapback. So

SPEAKER_02: 57:34

final question then, just about your future plans. You've

SPEAKER_03: 57:39

got a few gigs lined up. Parchman Farm that John Mayall sang, that song. Believe it or not, my English department at the University of Mississippi has a program called the Prison to College Pipeline at Parchman. And I will be doing a blues literature class for a group of 10 to 15 students. I've been told to call them not inmates, but I mean, they're inmates who are about to be released. These are people who are sort of looking forward. And I'm going to bring my harmonica in. I'm allowed to do that. In fact, I'm going to talk to the folks at Hohner and see, I'm going to see if I'm allowed to actually give the prisoners.

SPEAKER_02: 58:37

I'm not sure I'm allowed. So thanks so much for joining me today, Adam Gussell. Thanks, Neil. It was really my pleasure. Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. And be sure to check out the great range of harmonicas and products at www.zidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zidel Harmonicas. Many thanks to Adam, a true professor of the blues in both the written and oral form. Most of the songs discussed in the podcast are available via Adam's website. and also some of them on the usual Spotify playlist. Thanks for listening, and I'll leave you with Satan and Adam playing us out with my favourite track of theirs, Unlucky

SPEAKER_01: 59:17

Love. Oh, yeah. MUSIC PLAYS People, people, I'm unlucky in love Finders, keepers, losers, weepers That's the way that it's gotta be Finders and losers