Annie Raines interview

Annie Raines joins me on episode 83.

Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player. Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly attending a jam there in her youth, and meeting many great players and joining the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. 

Annie then teamed-up with her long time musical partner, Paul Rishell, after also meeting him around the Boston area. They have now been performing and recording together for over 30 years, releasing seven albums, and winning a WC Handy award for one of them. Annie has also guested on albums with several other artists, including Pinetop Perkins.

Annie teaches harmonica and has released an instructional video, and gives workshops at various harmonica gatherings.

Links:

Annie and Paul's website:
https://www.paulandannie.com/

John Gindick’s website:
https://gindick.com/harmonica/

Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ReDMrEdmbA

George Mayweather: What I'd Say:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wp-pAk4epI

Blues Harmonica Blueprint instruction:
https://truefire.com/techniques-guitar-lessons/blues-harmonica-blueprint/blues-harmonica-blueprint-introduction/v5544

Tomlin Harmonica School:
https://www.tomlinharmonicaschool.com/

Videos:

Annie singing You’ve Been A Good Old Wagon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKgydSYSC7k

Charles Leighton playing In A Sentimental Mood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsPhW6UXE00

Canned Heat Blues: from Live In Woodstock DVD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux-lQaoZewk

Harmonica UK Virtual Festival 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD4PzISV2FQ

Augusta Blues / Swing week 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXpwCMrs5c

Duet with John Sebastien:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmPOnRUDZAE

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

Chapters

• 1:34 Annie is from the Boston area of the US
• 1:45 What first drew Annie into music
• 2:10 Started playing some piano when seven years old, but was a bad student
• 3:08 Picked up music again in high school, playing a keyboard synthesiser
• 3:21 Did some singing in the synagogue, but didn’t know what she was singing in Hebrew
• 3:41 Started playing harmonica age 17, after looking for a book on how to juggle
• 4:06 Learnt to play harmonica from a John Gindick instructional book
• 4:16 Juggling and playing harmonica, and Juzzie Smith
• 4:44 Studied the John Gindick book in some detail
• 4:44 Studied the John Gindick book in some detail
• 6:33 Was given a tape of blues players from a younger student at school and Annie felt an affinity to the music of Muddy Waters
• 8:34 Started attending a blues jam in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 10:45 Annie got up to take part in her first blues jam about three months after first going to the club
• 11:54 Joined the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra
• 13:25 Learnt how to breathe through the harmonica in the orchestra
• 14:29 Some of the other well known members of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra
• 14:48 Annie met George Mayweather, who became a mentor for Annie
• 16:05 Annie took lessons from five different people from the Cambridge area, including Jerry Portnoy
• 17:17 First harmonica was a Pocket Pal which came with John Gindick book
• 17:23 Still tinkered on the piano but couldn’t improvise on that
• 18:09 Later developed singing and learnt to play mandolin
• 18:35 Dropped out of college to focus on music
• 18:54 Started teaching harmonica age 19 and received ten tapes of the harmonica greats
• 19:58 Slim Harpo was also an inspiration
• 21:52 How parents reacted to Annie dropping out of college to pursue music
• 22:47 Income from music wasn’t great in the early days
• 23:16 Had a tweed amp that had to carry on the bus
• 24:16 Paying gigs started a few years later playing with Shirley Lewis, and Annie could quit the day job
• 24:54 Practise regime followed
• 25:36 Did some work tuning harmonicas for Magic Dick’s harmonica venture
• 26:02 Teamed-up with Paul Rishell for the first time in 1992
• 27:11 Paul Rishell played harmonica friendly songs
• 28:08 Thought country blues was easy to play before experiencing it with Paul Rishell
• 29:14 Got gigs with Paul Rishell and started touring with him and playing a regular gig
• 31:18 First album recorded with Paul Rishell was I Want You To Know in 1996
• 32:16 Moving To The Country album was released in 2000, winning a WC Handy Award for Best Acoustic Blues album
• 32:40 Annie played three songs on Paul Rishell’s Swear To Tell The Truth album, before their partnership was established
• 33:16 Paul’s wife became seriously ill but still encouraged them to get out playing as they were starting to make a name for themselves
• 34:00 Goin’ Home album from 2004 and Annie’s singing
• 35:53 Harmonica is such a good instrument for giving a voice to a voiceless person
• 37:00 Chromatic harmonica
• 37:58 Heard Charles Leighton at the SPAH convention, who is a great chromatic player
• 39:04 A Night In Woodstock album with Paul Rishell also released as a DVD
• 39:21 A Night In Woodstock was released as album sales were dropping, so Annie and Paul set-up their own record company
• 40:01 Annie and Paul appear in a documentary called ‘Chasin’ Gus’ Ghost’
• 41:11 Guesting on other musicians albums, including Pinetop Perkins
• 42:24 Also recorded with John Sebastien
• 43:05 Played with Susan Tedeschi, with whom Annie was the first woman to play on the House of Blues stage in Boston
• 44:01 Being a female blues harmonica player
• 45:47 Released Blues Harmonica Blueprint instructional material
• 46:41 Has given harmonica workshops in various locations and lots of teaching of harmonica
• 47:54 10 minute question
• 49:14 Harmonica of choice is the traditional Hohner Marine Band
• 50:11 Hohner Super 64 is chromatic of choice
• 50:38 Created lot of different tunings when working on Magic Dick company harps, but generally doesn’t perform with different tunings
• 51:42 Overblows: doesn’t use them on a gig
• 52:11 Doesn’t do much maintenance work on own harmonicas
• 52:41 Is a Hohner endorsee
• 53:12 Embouchre: 70% tongue blocks, 30% pucker
• 54:07 Uses a small Vibro Champ amp mostly now as playing with Paul Rishell in a duo most of the time
• 54:41 Fender Deluxe Reverb is choice when need a large amp
• 54:46 Mic-up small amp when needed
• 55:05 Acoustic microphones: typically SM58 or a beta SM57
• 56:30 Amped microphones: Astatic 200 crystal mic
• 57:01 Effects: Boss RV3 (reverb pedal with delay), and a tape Echoplex
• 57:29 Future plans

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Annie Rains joins me on episode 83. Annie is an early pioneer as a female blues harmonica player. Hailing from the Boston area of the US, she drew on the rich source of harmonica inspiration from nearby Cambridge, regularly attending a jam there in her youth, and meeting many great players and joining the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. Annie then teamed up with her long-time musical partner, Paul Rochelle, after also meeting him around the Boston area. They have now been performing and recording together for over 30 years, releasing seven albums and winning a WC Handy Award for one of them. Annie has also guested on albums with several other artists, including Pinetop Perkins. Annie teaches harmonica and has released an instructional video and gives workshops at various harmonica gatherings. This podcast is sponsored by Zeidel Harmonicas, visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello, Annie Rains, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28

Hi, Neil. How are you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

I'm good, thank you. Thanks for joining today. Great to speak to you. So you're a native of Boston in the U.S.?

UNKNOWN: 0:00

?

SPEAKER_01: 1:37

That's correct. I grew up around Boston. I grew up in a few different towns around Boston, not in Boston proper.

SPEAKER_00: 1:45

What was your upbringing like with music? What got you into music in the first place?

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

My family were musical, but I guess what you call carriers. They didn't play instruments actively. My mother could carry a tune and my father could remember the lyrics to every song from the 1930s that he ever heard. They listened to opera and classical music around the house. They even had some jazz and blues albums that I wasn't aware of till later but when I was seven years old I discovered that I had an affinity for music I could pick out a tune on the piano by ear so my mother actually went out and got a piano and set me up with some piano lessons she didn't want me to have her experience of um Yeah. I think that was the chain. I might be adding a teacher there. And she taught me how to play the piano. And I was pretty bad because I never practiced. But I was a pretty bad piano student. And I did that for four years in grade school. And then I stopped. And then in high school, I wanted to get into music again. So I got a synthesizer keyboard because it was the mid 80s. And that's what was happening. Put a little band together with some other girls in school and we played Duran Duran covers for about a minute. And then also growing up Jewish, I was going to synagogue every week and I was learning how to sing in Hebrew without understanding what I was saying at all. So and sometimes I didn't even understand. I couldn't read very well. So I was just mouthing along and making sounds at more or less the right pitch. And that seemed to be good enough. And that actually I actually tied into learning harmonica later on.

SPEAKER_00: 3:41

You picked up harmonica at age 17, I think. So how did that come into it?

SPEAKER_01: 3:45

I was looking for a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz. This was a book I had taken out of the library a few years earlier, and I had learned some basic hand-eye coordination. And I thought, well, it'd be great the summer I turned 17 to learn to juggle. So I went to a store that should have had the book, but they were out of stock. And they had another similar book by the same publisher called called Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless by John Gindick. So I thought, well, what the hell, I'll get this instead and I'll play some harmonica.

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

Fantastic. So what happened to the juggling? Did that continue?

SPEAKER_01: 4:19

The juggling did not continue, fortunately for myself and everybody and for any breakable objects.

SPEAKER_00: 4:25

That is a shame because I also love to juggle. And if you listen to the interview with Jersey Smith, who's an Australian, he was a street busker for a long time. He does these amazing things while he's juggling and playing the harmonica at the same time. So it's not too late, Annie, for you to take up the juggling and do you want to check out jazzy smith on on youtube does some great stuff

SPEAKER_01: 4:43

michelle

SPEAKER_00: 4:44

Great. So yeah, so then you got

SPEAKER_01: 4:51

this book from John Gindick. Yeah. And what about then? How did you progress from there? but mostly this kind of hippie approach where the instrument is a friend and you build a relationship with it. And then the notes themselves are a little bit humanized. And you just get a relationship to music that seems intuitive and felt.

SPEAKER_03: 5:29

Well, I fall

SPEAKER_02: 5:32

in love.

UNKNOWN: 5:37

Well, I fall in love.

SPEAKER_01: 5:47

So I was learning how to play and I was still in high school and I would play in the hallways and I'd play at home and I'd play walking to and from school. And I would pick out tunes and learn things from the book and I would teach myself things like the Sesame Street theme or the Love Me Do harmonica riff.

SPEAKER_00: 6:25

Especially when they're both played on chromatic, but you were playing diatonic at this point. Right. Only were you, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:30

I didn't know what a chromatic was at the time, fortunately. About halfway through that semester, a student came up to me and said, I heard you play harmonica. He was a junior and I was a senior, so I was sort of a little standoffish with him. And I said, yeah. And he said, do you like the blues? I said, yeah, I think so. I think I've heard a little folk and a little blues folk. And I thought, yeah, I think I like the bluesy stuff. And he said, well, what about Muddy Waters? Do you like Muddy Waters? And I said, I've heard of them. So I thought Muddy Waters was a plural and a group of people called the Muddy Waters. So luckily, he had a few cassette tapes of Muddy Waters, and he lent those to me. And when I heard those, a really strange thing happened. I was always inclined towards music and art, but I wasn't what I considered a viable musician, artist, musician. theater person. I was a little too much in my head all the time. I didn't seem to be able to let go and really live in the art. A lot of my friends seem to be able to do that. They seem to be deeper and have more to say and a way of saying it. So I had sort of consigned myself to a very nerdy future. And then when I heard this music, I actually had the epiphany that I never imagined I could have. Oh my God, this music is the most incredible right thing I've ever heard. It

SPEAKER_03: 8:01

didn't

SPEAKER_01: 8:08

feel like this music, this musician is better than me. It felt like I'm included. Felt like everybody was invited to the table, kind of, and that really spoke to me about the music, how warm it was, and the rhythm of it, and just the tone.

SPEAKER_00: 8:23

Like most people, certainly a blues player, you hear those old blues greats, and then it just grabs you then. So from there, where did you go from there, from your learning?

SPEAKER_01: 8:34

From there, I was still in high school, and I had just finished pretty much all of my work for senior year, so I was slacking, officially. And I found out that there was a blues jam going on in the next town over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the 1369 Jazz Club. And there was a blues jam on Sundays from 1 in the afternoon until 8, hosted by a band called Silas Hubbard and the Hot Ribs. So I got there. It was about 3 in the afternoon. Probably my mom dropped me off. And there was a line out front, and there were big glass windows. It was an old Victorian-era house that had been turned into a storefront at some point. So you couldn't really see inside, but you could hear the bass thrumming out through the bones of the building out onto the sidewalk. And there was a line of people waiting to get in. Just the sound, it was exactly the sound I had heard probably Calvin Fuzz Jones or someone play with Muddy. And that sound was coming out. And then you open the door and I finally got in. It was the sights and sound. It was the red and blue lights and that bass and the piano and the sound of a slow blues playing. And then a sort of Bruegel-esque scene of actual adults doing adult things in a bar, drinking and laughing and digging the music. And also a somewhat interracial scene because in some parts of Boston, you had neighborhoods that were more mixed at the time. So it was a mix of suburban white people, urban white people who hadn't moved out to the suburbs, neighborhood people, working class people, really interesting and just another complete revelation. So right away, I was hooked on that now. And so I had to keep going back. There was a little problem with my being 17. And when they finally caught up to me, and found me out, I begged them to let me stay. They said, well, if Silas, the band leader, will take responsibility for you, you can stay. Because I knew that I couldn't yet get on stage and play, but I really, really wanted to. And if I could watch, if I could see what they were doing, I would learn so much faster than if I sat in my living room and tried to piece it together.

SPEAKER_00: 10:45

Great. So how long did it take you before you did get up and do your first jam then?

SPEAKER_01: 10:50

I think it took about three months. Terrifying. And I don't remember anything except... Losing track of where I was in the solo and then somehow finding my way back.

SPEAKER_00: 11:01

Yeah. So clearly you were, like you say, you were keen to get up on stage and start, you know, getting out there rather than just sitting at home. So you'd encourage people to do the same with you. You think it's really important to get out there and rather than just sort of, you know, being a bedroom player.

SPEAKER_01: 11:14

Absolutely. I mean, the scene isn't what it was before. 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when there were lots of clubs with people playing blues who had played with the old cats. That was the situation in Cambridge. You had people in the band who had played with Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf when they had come to Cambridge. It's harder to find that nowadays, but looking for mentors is so important, I think, too. Not just a scene... where people play, but also people who can teach you. And this town was just full of them. The other thing that happened, I would go to the jam and I made friends with people and started going at little parties and things. And I think I would play at the party somewhere, but I still wasn't ready to be on a stage. And one of the piano players at the jam invited me to join a group called the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, which was basically formed to play arts festivals and parades.

UNKNOWN: 12:07

piano plays

SPEAKER_01: 12:18

It was modeled somewhat on the old harmonica bands of the 1930s, but it was an R&B, blues, and rock outfit. So imagine 50 harmonica players on a stage playing Born in Chicago. together with parts, some playing rhythm parts, some playing lead parts, and then a couple of accordions thrown in and a musical saw and two drummers and a washed up bass. And that was the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. So this guy, Eric Two Scoops Moore, see later it was known, brought me down to the parade. There was a guy, almost in a cartoonish kind of way, he was throwing things out of a big cardboard box. He was distributing t-shirts and harmonicas to people. And Eric came up and this guy looked up from the box. It was Pierre Beauregard. He was the leader of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. And Eric said, Pierre, this is the girl I was telling you about. Can she play with the orchestra today? And he said, can you bend a note? I said, yes, because I had actually learned that a little. He said, okay, get her a t-shirt. So I got a yellow t-shirt and became a member of the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra. And that was also an amazing experience because playing in the rhythm section, you learn how to breathe. This is an opportunity that I don't think is afforded to enough players nowadays because you go up and you wait for your solo and then you play your solo and then you wait and this was being part of the music at all times and needing to keep up and needing to figure out which direction I was supposed to be playing in and play these little parts these little section parts

SPEAKER_00: 13:48

Sounds great I mean very lucky to have that so these were mostly diatonic players were they?

SPEAKER_01: 13:52

There were a few chromatic players who played in the lead section. It was a real merry band of stragglers. I mean, this was kind of like the last caboose on the freak train from the 60s in that you had a lot of old hippies, blues nuts, a few old guys in a subgroup called the Golden Agers who would play the old style chromatic trio. Yeah, it was a wonderful thing to encounter in the late 80s, this sort of band of refugees from the 60s who still wanted to get together and do things communally.

SPEAKER_00: 14:21

Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. place to learn. So you're great to have so many harmonica players in a short sort of geographical region as well, I guess.

SPEAKER_01: 14:29

Yes, absolutely. I'm trying to remember if Sugar Ray Norcia ever dropped in on those shows. He was usually busy with the Blue Tones. But a lot of the amateur players like Barbecue Bob McGlinty, people who are now mainstays on Facebook and other online harmonica resources, were all around here. Chuck Morris for Silas Hubbard. Silas's half-brother was Earring George Mayweather, who played with Eddie Taylor Taylor and J.B. Hutto in the 50s. And the blues jam was really a feature for George. George would sit at the front of the bar with a kind of graying high-top hairdo, a three-piece suit, a pocket protector in his breast pocket with pens in it, and a plastic rose on his lapel, and sunglasses, and an earring in one ear. Earring George. He'd sit at the bar drinking some kind of whiskey. And at the appointed time, he would be summoned to the bandstand and he would play a harmonica and he'd sing a version of What I Say.

UNKNOWN: 15:27

What I Say

SPEAKER_01: 15:40

and do his shtick. He had a great tone and a great sense of selectivity with his notes. He could just play one note in just the right spot and it would just honk, make the right sound. So he was one of the mentors that I found there, one of the real treasures in Cambridge that a lot of people don't know about. So

SPEAKER_00: 15:59

you talk about mentors. I mean, did you have any harmonica lessons with these people? Is it a case of just picking things up from them?

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

Before I left for college, the end of that summer, because I had just finished high school, and I played with the CHO all summer, and I played at the Blues Jam all summer. And before I left for college, I lined up five lessons with five different people. One of them was Chris Stovall-Brown, who's toured for a lot of years with Watermelon Slim now, but he's always been around Boston, always played with the old guys. Another guy named Chris Axworthy, a lesson with Barbecue Bob. I can't remember the fourth one. But the fifth one was a guy I never expected to find around Boston, Jerry Portnoy. That came as a complete shock. See, I thought all the people I heard on these Muddy Waters tapes were 700 years old and dead. There's just no way that this would be some guy living two towns over.

SPEAKER_02: 16:55

So

SPEAKER_01: 16:56

I took a lesson in person from Jerry Portnoy. It was two bus rides to get from Newton to Waltham and sit in his living room. And he taught me how to tongue block. So that was the lesson I brought with me when I went off to college.

SPEAKER_00: 17:08

Fantastic. Yeah. Great to have Jerry on the doorstep, like you say. So, you know, returning back then to the first book you got, the John Gindic one, what harmonica did you have as your first harmonica?

SPEAKER_01: 17:19

It was a harmonica that came with the book. It was called The Pocket Pal.

SPEAKER_00: 17:23

So did you carry on playing the piano during this time or did you devote yourself to the harmonica then?

SPEAKER_01: 17:27

I wasn't really devoted to the piano at that point anyway. We still had the piano, so I would still try to figure things out. I didn't know how to improvise. And that was a problem. Even people who didn't care as much about it as I did seemed to know how to improvise. And I would ask friends in high school, like, how do you do this? What part of your brain needs to separate from what other part of your brain to make this happen? So I really didn't understand the nature of it at all. And it wasn't like I was a great reader of music either, but I just didn't quite equate the improvisations that I heard with the way that that we all naturally improvise even in conversation. I didn't put it together with music at that point. So that became a quest.

SPEAKER_00: 18:09

Well, we'll get on to when we get into your recordings. You started recording singing and then also I believe you've taken up the mandolin quite recently, is it?

SPEAKER_01: 18:28

Yeah, that's jumping forward quite a bit. So I still... would maintain a relationship with the piano. When I came home from... I dropped out of college to play harmonica with a band at the 1369 called Some Blues by Butch. And that was when I was 18. So I was really focused on the harmonica, but I would still play the piano. And I started writing songs on the piano. That was a way I could give myself a chord and some understanding of the music. And I also would teach harmonica. I started teaching when I was 19 in front of the piano. So I was always moving... forward a little bit with the piano when I started listening to different kinds of blues. There was a guy at the 1369 named Johnny Jammer, and he was an amazing player. He could play really fast with good tone, kind of in the Butterfield School, but also with more Big Walter-esque tone somehow. If you could merge both halves of an offer you can't refuse, and then speed it up, it would sound like this guy. He gave me cassette tapes of Junior Wells' Sunny Boy II, More Muddy Waters, George Smith, William Clark, James Cotton, Big Walter. He gave me all the good stuff. He gave me 10 cassette tapes and I took those to college with me. And that was my required listening every hour of every day. And Charlie Musselwhite as well, and a couple of compilations, Johnny Shines and Johnny Young. A lot of Little Walter that I'd never heard. So that became my education while I was in college, was these 10 cassette tapes and the lesson I had recorded from Jerry's.

SPEAKER_00: 19:58

I've also seen that you're quite a fan of Slim Harpo's playing.

SPEAKER_01: 20:02

Slim Harpo. Actually, I got a tape of Slim Harpo from another guy. I also brought that to college, and that was a huge influence at that time because I was learning tongue-blocking. And I suddenly put it together that that's what Slim Harpo was doing. And while I was listening to Slim Harpo, I was learning how to play in first and third position, and I didn't know it. I didn't know anything about positions, but that's what Slim Harpo does. He just takes the same riff and plays it in a different key in the same place, and suddenly it's third position.

SPEAKER_00: 20:31

Yeah, so from my understanding of Slim Harpo, he was pretty... successful commercially um you know when he was around and playing so he kind of popularized probably quite a lot of blues but He also, I think he played harmonica on a rack most of the time, didn't he?

SPEAKER_01: 21:00

You know, I'm just not sure if he did or not, because I don't know enough about Slim Harpo. There's always that picture of him with a guitar, but I don't think he was really a guitar player.

SPEAKER_02: 21:10

His

SPEAKER_01: 21:11

thing was really harmonica. Unfortunately, he died way too early. just when he was about to become a huge hit, just after he cashed the check from the Rolling Stones. Kenny Neal was telling me that he was a Baton Rouge guy. He was still doing the work that he'd been doing before he became a musician, which was working on heavy equipment, like big truck engines and things. And I believe he was trying to lift an engine out of a chassis when he basically popped a blood vessel or something. And that was it. He wasn't old, but he just overtaxed himself doing that. Really a shame because he would have been all over TV. There'd be so much Slim Harpo footage we could have all watched and listened to.

SPEAKER_00: 21:52

So going back then to the comment you're saying you dropped out of college to pursue a life in harmonica at the age of 18, how did your parents take to that decision?

SPEAKER_01: 22:02

Well, might you ask? It was a little touch and go, but ultimately they felt, I think, protective of me enough not to just throw me out of the house. There were conversations where there seemed like an ultimatum might be in the offing, but ultimately they sort of backed down. My mother was an artist too, and she had always encouraged us to put our troubles into our art. So she couldn't really argue with the idea of that. They made it a condition of my living at home and saving on rent that I would get a day job, which I did. I went out to the local grocery store and became a deli worker by day. And then by night, going to the blues jams and going out to clubs and seeing James Cotton and trying to grow up really fast.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

Yeah, great. But you were able to, from an early stage, you were able to make a decent amount of money out of the music, were you?

SPEAKER_01: 22:52

No, actually. First, it was just the jams and the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, and those gigs didn't pay. When I joined this band, the Blues by Butch, I assumed it was a job. But what usually happened was, I think the whole band got paid$75, and they probably drank about twice that. So the bar tab got paid, and I didn't. I don't think. Also, I had a Tweed amp that I'd gotten through one of the guys in town. I bought this kind of a Fender Deluxe, a Fender 210 Super it was called. It was really a cut down 410 basement that had been put in a smaller case and wired like that. 1954, great sound and it really heavy. And I would pick up this amp and carry it two blocks to the bus stop to get a bus to the next place where I would get off that bus and wait for another bus to take me to Cambridge. And then from there, I would walk a couple of blocks and get another bus to get to where the club was. And I did that a few times before I started wising up and realizing it'd be better to spend a few dollars on a taxi. But I was very dedicated to getting there and doing my job. Trying to think of when I actually got paid for a gig. I might have gotten$15 if the band didn't... use the money to pay the tab because I didn't drink at all. You know, I couldn't. It would have been illegal. And I didn't even want to risk it. A couple of years after that, I got a gig playing with a woman named Shirley Lewis, the Shirley Lewis Experience. And she had more of a show band and she ran it in a more business-like way. And then I would make actually some decent money. And at that point, when I was working steadily with her, I felt like I was ready to leave the day job. But it took about three or four years. And in the meantime, Butch unfortunately passed away. That was an amazing ride playing with Butch because he taught me really how to improvise, how to play for my soul, how to tell a story, everything in that band. So it was much more than a gig. It wasn't a money gig.

SPEAKER_00: 24:53

So when you were learning and improving at this stage, and then also through your musical career, How would you describe your practice routine? How did you initially start practicing and how has that evolved?

SPEAKER_01: 25:06

I never really had a practice routine. I would just play. When I was studying from the book, I would actually study and try to work through the lessons. But when I was practicing, I might play the tape of the lesson I'd taken from Jerry and go over it. But more often than not, I was just studying and I was just into playing. Also, I learned from Pierre how to draw a schematic of the harmonica and understand where the notes and where the different keys were in the different positions. So I started doing that. One of the reasons I was able to drop out of school, I thought, was in addition to playing in this band, I was going to be working for Pierre and his partner, Magic Dick, tuning harmonicas for their company. That turned out to be a little late to materialize, but I did learn how to tune harmonicas in the meantime. So I was always learning and always... working on things and always getting mentored by my various band leaders. But after Butch passed away, about a year after Butch passed away in 92, somebody called with a cancellation. They needed a band to fill in. And did I have a band? Well, I didn't have a band, but I think it was Pierre recommended that I call Paul Rochelle. And Paul turned out had a rhythm section and a PA system. And I had the gig and I had a car. And between all that, we actually had the ability to get to and play said gig. That was the beginning of us playing together in late 92. piano plays

SPEAKER_00: 26:44

Yeah. So let's get on to your partnership with Paul Rochelle, as you mentioned there. So I think you were 22, I think, when you first met Paul and started playing with him. And he was 42, was he?

SPEAKER_01: 26:55

Yes. Actually, we'd met a couple of years before I'd sat in with his band. He had a harmonica player named Arnie Fox, another sort of butterfieldy player, great big guy and funny. I think Pierre introduced me to Arnie and Arnie invited me to come down in here and play with Paul. And then I sat in at the end of the night. One of the things I noticed about Paul that made it really stay out from other players in town was that he was a guitar player who was playing harmonica-friendly material. Everybody at that time was... super into B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King. And even though there were lots of great harmonica players in town, there weren't a lot of people who would play parts that supported the harmonica. You know, Robert Lockwood, for instance, kind of parts. So Paul was playing Sonny Boy's Keep It to Yourself or something when I sat in with him. I thought, this is great. I can actually sink my teeth into something. Because Butch and I had been doing that kind of material, but that wasn't commonplace in town at the time. So a couple of years later, when I played this band show with Paul, I was able to keep up with that kind of material. And then I had actually sat in with Paul a year before that for a duo gig. I think when Butch had fallen ill, I called Paul to fill in for that. And that was really strange because that was country blues. And I thought country blues, that's like acoustic blues. That must be like Jimmy Reed. I thought it was real simple, two strings on the guitar, or like Muddy Waters' folk singer. Like, I got this. And then Paul started playing Michigan Water or something. And I thought, what is going on? I have no idea what to play. I have no idea what the time is. There were all kinds of poly rhythms going on. It was so different from what I had heard. It sounded good, but I was having trouble figuring out what would work with it. And so I just laid way back and tried not to do anything that would sound bad with it, which was tricky. So I did a lot of not playing, which he

SPEAKER_03: 28:49

appreciated.

SPEAKER_00: 29:08

So great. So yeah, so you teamed up with him and you were playing, what, jams at first with him and that progressed to getting gigs and things, did it?

SPEAKER_01: 29:15

No jams. He wouldn't go to jams. He and his wife had a baby, and so he was home a lot when he wasn't working. So I didn't meet him at jams, just sitting in with him on one gig and then hiring him for a gig and then working. And then putting together this show. But once that happened, he started hiring me to play with him. Paul was better established being 20 years older. So he had work in town. He had just made an album. He was getting reviews and he had a lot of cred in town. So when I started working with him, it was very exciting. It was like being asked to the prom by the most popular boy in school, in my mind, anyway. But it was very exciting to be asked to join him on the road. And we started touring around together with the band. So that's where that started. But he also had a steady gig playing every Wednesday, opening for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters at a little bar. And so I started going out there and sitting in with him there. And then his wife, who was his manager, his wife, Leslie, said, well, why don't you start just playing these gigs with Paul for hire? And I said, oh, Lord, you know, I know there's not a lot of money in these things. I don't want to take money out of his pocket. And she said, well, look, he doesn't drive. So when he plays, I drive him. So it's like he's getting paid for two people anyway. She says, if you go out and work with them and you guys set up the PA system, I can stay home and see my kid once in a while. So she convinced me that that it was the right thing to do. Then he got a steady gig at the first House of Blues, the prototype House of Blues in Cambridge. We had a lunchtime gig there and then the evening gig at the Sitting Bowl. So we weren't really officially music partners at the time, but he kept calling me to work on these shows. And then Leslie would call me and start arranging tours and things. So we started working more steadily. And I was still freelancing and playing with lots of other people, but it definitely made me more desirable as a player or something because people knew I played with paul so suddenly i i raided

SPEAKER_00: 31:14

definitely yeah and so you went on to record i think seven albums with paul so the first one in 96 was i i want you to know um where you're doing a combination of um a combination of you know acoustic and amplified playing so

SPEAKER_01: 31:42

That's right. That's what was happening. Paul, at the time, was a solo player when he wasn't playing in a band. His main thing was playing country blues. That's what he taught himself first. And that's what he had learned sitting around with Sun House and Sonny Terry and playing with those guys. So that was his first and his main love, but he was playing in the band just to have work. My concept had really come from the Chicago style band stuff. So I was learning about the country blues each time we played together. Sometimes we would have gigs where we'd open up for ourselves. We'd play a duo set and then play a band set.

SPEAKER_00: 32:16

And then your second album was Moving to the Country in 2000. And this one, you won a WC Yes,

SPEAKER_01: 32:38

that was good for us in a lot of ways. Actually, before I want you to know, I recorded, Paul asked me to record on his album in progress at the time called Swear to Tell the Truth.

UNKNOWN: 32:48

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01: 32:48

And I ended up playing on, I can't remember if I played on any of the acoustic tracks or not, but there was another harmonica player, the records producer, Richard Rosenblatt, who played on it. And then Paul asked me to play on it. And I think it was two or three songs that I played on. And we got the band in the studio and did that. And then I actually helped mix the record too. So that was a run up to the partnership. By 94, we sort of became more officially music partners. Around this time, Paul's wife fell ill with breast cancer in 1994. They had the young daughter, seven years old. People knocking at the door and John Sebastian called up Paul and said, I want you to play with me. And everything was kind of happening all at once. We were starting to take off and she was saying, go out and work as much as you possibly can so that you can get established while you still can. Really a tumultuous time and a lot of great things were happening and a lot of terrible things as well.

SPEAKER_00: 33:46

So it's like she was very understanding and supportive.

SPEAKER_01: 33:49

Oh, more than that. She was a visionary and she actually could see things happening and playing out years into the future. So when she told us to do things, we listened.

SPEAKER_00: 33:58

Good. And then another album you did with Paul was Going Home, I think in 2004. I've got you were singing on a song, Black Eye Blues. So, you know, at what point did you sort of start singing more with Paul and recording?

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

Oh God, I have such a weird history with singing. I liked to sing sometimes around the house and with people, but I wasn't a singer. I But people would tell me not to sing. So I got kind of weird about it. I got really self-conscious. And then that made it sound even worse. So I've always really struggled with it. Wanted to, but felt very repressed about singing. So for the first several years of playing, I didn't even attempt to sing. Butch told me one time, look, I didn't hire you to try to play harmonica in my band. So don't try to sing. I said, all right, I can't try to sing. I have to just sing. But it was really hard to figure that out. But Paul got me to sing Gotta Fly. That was my song that I wrote. And he came up with the guitar part. So that was a couple of years in to our partnership that I started singing. And Paul's such a good singer. I didn't feel like anything was missing. But that was sort of where it started because I was always writing songs. I just didn't necessarily hear myself singing them.

SPEAKER_00: 35:25

Yeah, but I talk a lot on here about the value of being able to sing as a harmonica player. So something you think was well worth it for you.

SPEAKER_01: 35:33

Well, it still is, and it's still a struggle. The harmonica is such a good instrument for giving a voice to a voiceless person. a person who can't be heard any other way, who can't find the words or who isn't allowed to let the words out, but the sound and the feeling are clear as day. So the harmonica is really my instrument that way. I mean, I really feel like it translates feelings directly and sings on its own. I've tried to make a study of singing at times, but it's not really my instrument per se, because I don't feel like a natural that way. I really have struggled with it, and I haven't been able to buckle down and get a lot better at it. But I love... singers and I love the idea of singing with a real voice and when I say a voice I don't mean just like a good voice like a good set of pipes but the ability to convey a story through singing words. The song that I feel has really helped me break through to another level is Bessie Smith's You've Been a Good Old Wagon, which we've tried to record a couple times. I'm hoping to get it on our next record, but we have gotten some pretty good live versions of it that are out there on

SPEAKER_02: 36:46

YouTube. When a rain man can be found, you've been a good old wagon. Dad So

SPEAKER_00: 37:01

I noticed there are two songs on the Going Home album where you're playing chromatic on one of them.

UNKNOWN: 37:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 37:25

What about using the chromatic and how you learned that and incorporated that?

SPEAKER_01: 37:31

I think I got my first chromatic when I was in my early 20s and I was learning how to play some third position blues. That's just breathing in, basically. Tongue blocking, playing octave style and playing wider octaves or narrower sevenths and sixths. It also made such a nice sound by itself. I didn't feel... And I still don't feel like I can really create that sense of voice and character through the chromatic, but that's what I try to do. When I was 21 or so, I went out to Detroit to the Spock Convention. They were having the spa and the world championships the same year. And I went out there and met all these great cats. And Charlie Layton was the giant among them, in my mind. I sat in the lobby of this hotel with a crowd of other harmonica geeks and geeked out to Howard Levy and Charlie Layton having like a 15, 20 minute throwdown, a medley of every jazz quote you could ever imagine. And I taped everything. I would go around with my Walkman and record live shows. Charlie Layton If you haven't heard him, he's a must hear. He kind of completes the circle. If you're a tone junkie and you listen to lots of Big Walter and you love tone, then Charlie Layton is the natural extension of that on the chromatic. It's got such a beautiful sound. And like Jerry Portnoy, too, he plays very languidly.¦

SPEAKER_00: 39:04

Another album you released with Paul Rochelle was A Night in Woodstock, which is also a DVD. And there's some great videos on YouTube. I put some links onto those. So yeah, it's a nice live one.

SPEAKER_01: 39:14

What had happened was when we made Going Home in 2003, 2004, the record industry was tanking. And with our unerring timing, we managed to make a record right as the bottom was dropping out of the CD market. At the record company we were on at the time, Tone Cool got absorbed and garroted by it. by the record company that bought it. We lost our catalog of all our recordings. They all got bought up. And our new release was going to be basically not canned, but just left to die. So I sort of took over on the business side, trying to promote it and get the word out about it as much as I could. But there wasn't that much hope for record promotion. And after that, we decided to start our own record company. And around that time, we met Todd Quaid, who was filming this documentary about jug band music with John Sebastian called Chase and Gus's Ghost, which became the documentary and the title of John's album that we were on. He offered to film us so that he could use a clip in the documentary, and he paid for the whole thing. We ended up having this gig in Woodstock just coincidentally around the same time. So he brought the crew out, film crew with major, huge cameras. But there was a ground problem in the club. front of house board and the monitor board, there were two separate electrical services coming into the same club. And I guess the front of house and the back of house were on two separate systems. And there was this ground hum that practically rewired the whole building to try to eliminate it. But there's still a little bit of sound in there. But other than that, other than waiting five or 10 hours to play while they rewired the building, and Paul had about 10 cognacs while he was waiting, everything went smoothly after that.

SPEAKER_00: 40:59

Yeah, no, it's great to have the DVD. It looks pretty good quality filming.

SPEAKER_01: 41:03

Oh, yeah. They did an amazing job. That company, Nevesa, they do major shows all over the world.

SPEAKER_00: 41:09

Yeah, it looks great. It's great to have that one down, yeah. And so as well as playing with Paul, you mentioned obviously you play with other people. So just mention a few of those. You play with Pinetop Perkins.

UNKNOWN: 41:22

Pinetop Perkins.

SPEAKER_00: 41:31

He was Moneywater's piano player for quite a long time. So how did that come about?

SPEAKER_01: 41:37

Little Mike and the Tornadoes were backing up Pinetop on tour at that time and they came up to a real joint in Worcester called the Gilrains in a funky part of town. But it was a great blues club. Everybody came through there. So they were playing at Gilrains and I met Little Mike and he invited me to come up and sit in. And I never realized before that How integral all those parts were. When I thought of Muddy Waters or when I thought of Little Walter, I thought just of the harmonica. I didn't realize the support system that went into making that sound. Being able to play with Pinetop comping behind me just taught me how important the band is. People can't just get up and strum chords behind you and have it be that sound. Everything has to work together.

SPEAKER_00: 42:23

Yeah, superb to get that. And then you played with Susan Tedeschi and also John Sebastian, who's another harmonica player. He guested on an album with you, didn't he? And there's a recording of you playing Orange Dew Blues on YouTube, which is a good clip as well.

UNKNOWN: 42:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 42:53

That's right. Orange Dude is actually the nickname for Fritz Richman, the jug player who had passed away that year. So we're doing it kind of in tribute to him. Yeah, I started playing with Susan. I think I'd already started playing with Paul. And the Boston Blues scene was kind of percolating at that point because the House of Blues had just opened up. And Susan reminded me once that she and I were the first women to play on that stage at the House of Blues. But she was an up and coming recent Berklee College of Music graduate. She was playing in bands and trying to get her stage legs, or she had stage legs, but she was trying to get her band legs together, having a band and running it. And she was taking a couple of guitar lessons from Paul. And she hired me to play with her because my name was better known in Boston than hers was. And she could get some gigs on the strength of my being in the band, which is one of my favorites. favorite ironies.

SPEAKER_00: 44:01

You mentioned that you're some of the first females playing, so we'll touch on that subject now. So you're probably one of the first female blues players, it's fair to say, and you've been described as the queen of the blues harmonica. So what's it like being a female blues harmonica player?

SPEAKER_01: 44:15

It wasn't my intent, certainly, to go out and be a female blues harmonica player. That wasn't how I was relating to the instrument at all. Like, you know, what would a woman do on this? I was just crazy for that sound. I think people took me under their wing sometimes more because they didn't feel threatened. So There was an advantage that way in being a young girl and that people sometimes were protective of me or they were really glad to explain things at great length, which now is called mansplaining, but at the time it was really helpful. But there was some good information to be had and people were very free with that. And then maybe a little less pressure to fall in line with and compete with the guys that way. In other ways, it was a huge disadvantage in that a lot of the guys couldn't envision how having a woman in the band, so I would be bypassed for certain opportunities. But how it usually worked out was people who could see through that were the ones who would ask me to do things, and they were much more worth playing with. It could be tricky. There were a lot of encounters of meeting Junior Wills and not getting the same rap a guy would have gotten. But mostly people were kind and friendly to me. But I never tried to exploit it as a novelty, and I never felt that it would be being true to myself to do that. I think it would be a difficulty Because I'm not into the shtick as far as trying to sell femininity or sell female sexuality or something. I just really try to be myself up there and whatever mix of X and Y chromosomes has to be it.

SPEAKER_00: 45:47

So talking about something else you've done is you've released a Blues Harmonica Blueprint, which are sort of interactive online lessons, some tuition material that you've re-released.

SPEAKER_01: 45:58

Actually, believe it or not, Neil, has been 10 years since I released that, but it's still selling really well. It was the culmination of 20 years of teaching and about 10 years of really taking intense notes on my teaching to get to that point. I worked a lot on organizing it and I had a lot of thoughts about the way people learn and the way I learn. I'm a very discursive learner and I need to take things in from different modalities, thinking about how some people learn very technically and some people learn very intuitively. And I really wanted to find a way to speak to people, not have people feel left out or intimidated by the technical part. And I wanted to draw them into the rhythms that I learned from the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra and the sense of being part of the music.

SPEAKER_00: 46:41

And you've done quite a lot of workshops. I think you've done some workshops with Paul Rochelle, haven't you? You did an online workshop. with Harmonica UK in 2020. I'll put the link on to the podcast page so people can check that out. You're talking a lot about tongue blocking and various techniques on there and also another one, Augusta Blues. So you've done quite a lot of workshops as well. It's something you do quite a lot teaching.

SPEAKER_01: 47:01

Oh, yeah. It's been a big part of my musical life since, again, since I was 19 or so and I started just passing on what I knew at that time. I could never exclusively teach. I have to play in order to feel like I have something to teach. But teaching is definitely something I'm passionate about. During the beginning of COVID, when the Zoom thing wasn't quite up to the task of translating harmonica sounds, I just stopped for a while. And then the technology caught up, and I've just been getting back into giving private lessons on Zoom again. And that's actually been wonderful. I've been teaching students all over the world. I've been sitting in on some of Tomlin's harmonica seminars. I think I have another one coming up sometime soon. So it's been a nice way during all the shutdowns of the pandemic to reconnect with the harmonica community and find out that they're educators who are really helping to keep the community together. So

SPEAKER_00: 47:54

a related question about this, we touched on this a little bit with practice earlier on, but if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend those 10 minutes doing?

SPEAKER_01: 48:03

When I play harmonica when i practice a lot of times what i'll do is i'll just pick a song out of the air whether it's a shuffle or a rumba or some little rhythm part and i'll just start playing a little rhythm like the way you drum your fingers on a table almost i'll just try doing that on harmonica a little back and forth blowing and drawing or if i hear a bass line i'll play a bass line so I'll start out by playing the rhythm part, and I might figure out what the bass line is to that rhythm part. These are not complicated songs. Oftentimes it's a one-chord jam. I'll start just breathing in rhythm. I can start embellishing on that. And once you have established a rhythm, you don't need to play it constantly. You loop that in your head and now you're accompanying yourself. Then from there, I might get an idea and I might stop and break it down and work on it if there's a tricky part or something like that. If there's a specific assignment to learn, say, a tricky part in a certain position, then I might need to just work on that till I get it, sing it to myself or tab it out. You really want to throw everything you can against the wall. It's So we'll

SPEAKER_00: 49:09

move on to the last section now, Annie. We'll talk about gear to finish off. So first of all, what's your harmonica of choice?

SPEAKER_01: 49:16

I'm still a diehard Marine band girl. After all these years, I started with the Pocket Pal and I graduated to Blues Harps. That was, I think, one of the recommended brands. The old Blues Harps, not the current Blues Harps. And then, of course, since Jerry played Marine bands, I had to play, I had to do whatever Jerry did. I was like a little Jerry's shadow for a couple of years there. So I started playing Marine bands. I like the deluxes. I have a couple of crossovers, but to me, even with all its flaws, the stock of marine bands still gives me the best middle range of tones and volume. Like on a deluxe, it's really hard to modulate your volume from low to high. It just kind of kicks up to high really fast. Marine bands, they fight back a little bit. They give you some resistance, and then they give you places to find a sweet spot. So that still works the best for me so far of the harps that I've tried. But I'm always open to trying new harps.

SPEAKER_00: 50:11

And what about chromatics?

SPEAKER_01: 50:12

I started with a Hohner Super 64X. I still have an old style one and I have a new style one that I'm still getting used to. I'm not a great chromatic player. I don't really spend the amount of time I would need to to be even a good player. I can pick a few things out on chromatic. And again, my idol is Charlie Layton. So if I ever wanted to sound like somebody, it would be him.

SPEAKER_00: 50:31

And so you play 16 holes generally when you play?

SPEAKER_01: 50:34

Yeah, that is just more comfortable. You have the range if you need it. Do

SPEAKER_00: 50:38

you play any different tuned diatonics?

SPEAKER_01: 50:41

Well, I started out playing a lot of different tunings of diatonics because I was learning to tune them. So I made my own major seventh harp and then I turned into a Frankenstein doctor. I would put a C blow plate and a D harmonica draw plate together and then just see what happened. And I made a harmonica that I tuned to play the autumn leaves. I was trying to get all the circle of fifths on one harmonica. It made an interesting little sound. But as a rule, I don't generally play them with Paul. With Paul, it's almost straight down the line, cross harp and some first position and occasional third position and some chromatic. And sometimes with Paul, the first song I played with Paul on chromatic was... Tears by Django Reinhardt on the Move Into The Country album.

SPEAKER_00: 51:42

And what about overblows? Do you use those?

SPEAKER_01: 51:46

I... can occasionally make an overblow but no i've almost never been able to use those on on a gig i've tried but i've really felt like there's so much i can get out of just the 36 notes you can get with bending without treading in that territory if i could i would but it's it's hard to go there i'd rather play those intervals on chromatic if i was going to play them

SPEAKER_00: 52:10

yeah but uh i mean you talk about obviously you did lots of tuning when you were doing that work with magic dicks harmonica company so is that something you still do you still do lots of tinkering and make sure your harps are well set up and nice in tune do you spend the time doing that

SPEAKER_01: 52:24

no i haven't in years i haven't really had a good setup to do that or nor the time but it was a good part of my background on learning about the works of the harmonica but ultimately i would just carry around an exacto knife and occasionally shave a reed a little bit to get it in tune and once i got an endorsement deal with honer i was able to get more new out of the box harmonicas. And then I, that made it a lot easier to just have working instruments. And also I had to give back my strobo tuner that I, that Dick and Pierre had bought for me. They needed it back. And so once I didn't have a strobo tuner, it didn't seem worth it because that that's really what you need. I guess now you can get an electronic version of that and everything, but this was a solid state one from the sixties with the wheel that actually turned. It's a great thing.

SPEAKER_00: 53:11

Yeah, yeah. And so embouchure-wise, you talked about tongue blocking. I think you initially did you pick, well, you've said already you picked tongue blocking up off Jerry Portnoy. So you're a committed tongue blocker, are you, these days?

SPEAKER_01: 53:22

It's always been. Since the time that I figured out what tongue blocking was all about, how it improved your tone and everything, I was always trying to sound like Jerry for the first couple of years. So I ended up overdoing it a little bit and tongue blocking everything and then learning to back off that. And then the next time I ran into Jerry somewhere, he said, I'm just rediscovering puckering. Damn. I have to go back and relearn everything now because Jerry's puckering again. So I would say probably about 70% to 80% of the time. But it's much more important to get to the note on time, sounding the way you want to sound. And whatever you have to do to do that, there are a lot of things that go through your mind as you're matriculating these little sounds.

SPEAKER_00: 54:07

What about gear-wise amplifiers? What do you like to use?

SPEAKER_01: 54:11

I like small amplifiers. We haven't played with a band now in a long time. And I used to drag around a 410 Bassman or a Super Reverb in order to cut. But if you need to be that loud, then the band is probably too loud too. Now with Paul as a duo, when we play amplified, I've got a little Vibro Champ that I play with a 10-inch speaker. And the 10-inch speaker makes all the difference because the 8 in a regular Champ is a little small. it breaks up too easily and then it sounds tinny. So the 10-inch speaker is perfect. And then if we were playing with a band, I'd have to go to something bigger like a deluxe reverb or something.

SPEAKER_00: 54:46

Yeah, and do you find you have to mic up the small arm?

SPEAKER_01: 54:49

It depends on the room. In a lot of places, the amp is too loud already, even without micing it. We've played in places where we've had to put the amps on the side of the stage pointing towards us in order not to inflict them on the audience. We've played in places where the drummer had to be in a plexiglass cage

SPEAKER_00: 55:05

And what about microphones?

SPEAKER_01: 55:07

For playing acoustic harmonica?

SPEAKER_00: 55:10

Well, both. Start with acoustic.

SPEAKER_01: 55:12

Well, I just play through the vocal mic when we're playing that way. So I usually follow shape mic like a Shure SM58. That's a pretty natural feel for me. Sometimes we go somewhere and the sound man brings up these special mics and says, hey, I brought this because I thought it would sound good for that. I can't really tell. It seems to me that the kind of crappy mic is just fine. And then more velvety studio mics and everything. I leave that to the sound guys to figure out. I don't have anything that is more dependable than an SM58. And sometimes a Beta 57 is nice if you're going to hold a microphone, especially with a band. If you need to actually cup the mic and you don't have a harp mic with you, then a Beta 57 gives you a pretty nice sound. Again, it's all about making a sound. The notes and things, you have to learn the notes to be able to have the tools, but you need to use those tools to tell a story. And there's a particular sound that goes with this kind of music. And there's certain stories that are told through the music. So it's your own story, but there's also a universal story and there's a very specific story. I'm sorry, I'm getting away from the technical part of it a little bit here, but whatever the mic is, it's really about the sound you make in your body. And the microphone is just amplifying that, hopefully not getting in the way.

SPEAKER_00: 56:29

And what about when you're playing more of an amp sound? Do you use any particular mics for that?

SPEAKER_01: 56:35

For years, I've been playing an Astatic 200. Sometimes I'd find them in antique stores. I always send them right to Dennis Gruenling. He knows what to do. So a crystal element Astatic is really my mic of choice. I started with a Green Bullet. And a Green Bullet has a really intense sound, but sometimes you don't want to be intense like that. Sometimes you want to have some nuance and I love the milky sound of good crystal mic.

SPEAKER_00: 57:01

And do you use any effects

SPEAKER_01: 57:03

at all? I use a reverb pedal if I have an amp without reverb and it has a little delay in it too. It's actually, again, a Jerry recommendation, a Boss RV3, which is obsolete, but you can get an RV5 and an RV whatever and put them together and get reverb and delay. When we recorded I Want You to Know, I played through an Echoplex for the first time and that became a studio mainstay. I love the sound of an old tape Echoplex.

SPEAKER_00: 57:29

Final question then. So just about your future plans, what have you got planned gig-wise, any more albums and things like that?

SPEAKER_01: 57:37

Paul and I are back in the studio occasionally trying to remember who we are. We had a couple of years off and I think when I don't have work, I'm not really here, not really alive. So I've been I've been doing things with music, but it's not the same relationship if you don't have a gig to get ready for and go to and the moment of connecting with the audience and all that.

SPEAKER_02: 57:58

We've

SPEAKER_01: 57:59

started playing out again, and that's very helpful and helps inform what we're doing in the studio. So far, we're just recording acoustic songs, recording more old songs, old country blues. But we always have ideas of other songs and other kinds of music that might end up on a project.

SPEAKER_00: 58:16

So thanks so much for joining me today, Annie Rains.

SPEAKER_01: 58:19

Oh, thank you, Neil. It was really fun talking with you and took me down memory lane and back again.

SPEAKER_00: 58:25

Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. 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 Annie for joining me today, really flying the flag for female harp players. Let's see more of them. Also thanks to Clemens Zorn for the donation to the podcast and also for his helpful suggestions about the podcast. If people have suggestions, then please email me on happyhourharmonicapodcast at gmail.com. I'll sign out now with Annie playing a live

SPEAKER_02: 59:01

version

SPEAKER_00: 59:08

of Looking Good.

UNKNOWN: 59:08

Looking Good. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 59:29

Thank you.