Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast

Donald Black interview

• Neil Warren • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Donald Black is predominantly a tremolo player, using the instrument to great effect across the range of traditional Scottish music. He learnt many of the tunes he loves from accordion music, emulating the sound on the tremolo harmonica. 

Donald’s musical career started quite late in life, and since then he has performed around the world, appearing at the SPAH convention and even in Moscow. With five albums to his name, Donald has also recorded two tracks with the great Charlie McCoy. 
His music summons the beautiful scenery of the misty glens of bonny Scotland.


Select the Chapter Markers tab above to select different sections of the podcast (website version only).

Links:
Donald's website:
https://donald-black.com/

Album reviews:
https://donald-black.com/albums-reviews/

Tony Eyers site on Tremolo harmonica:
http://tremoloharmonica.com/
Profile of Donald: http://tremoloharmonica.com/donald-black.shtml

Winslow Yerxa's, author of 'Harmonica For Dummies':
https://winslowyerxa.com/

The Encyclopedia of Harmonica book by Peter Krampert:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Encyclopedia-Harmonica-Peter-Krampert-ebook/dp/B07TW9MRW5

Di Mundharmonica by Cristoph Wagner:
https://www.amazon.de/Die-Mundharmonika-Ein-musikalischer-Globetrotter/dp/3887471105



YouTube:

NHL Bristol in 2007:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7R3vZclR2M

Harmonica UK Lockdown session from 2020:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89fnOFmU9po

Piping Live in 2018:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtXnQpyYcmc

Donald Black Band in Klingenthal in 2018:
https://www.facebook.com/100004723477107/videos/1118269991673773/


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/

Support the show

SPEAKER_00:

Donald Black joins me on episode 28 of the podcast. Donald is predominantly a tremolo player, using the instrument to great effect across the range of traditional Scottish music. He learnt many of the tunes he loves from accordion music, emulating the sound on the tremolo harmonica. Donald's musical career started quite late in life, and since then he has performed around the world, appearing at the Spa Convention and even in Moscow. With five albums to his name, Donald has also recorded two tracks with the great Charlie McCoy. His music summons the beautiful scenery of the misty glens of Bonnie, Scotland. A word to my sponsor again, thanks to the Lone Wolf Blues Company, makers of effects pedals, microphones and more, designed for harmonica. Remember, when you want control over your tone, you want Lone Wolf. Lone Wolf Hello, Donald Black, and welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, Neil.

SPEAKER_00:

You're from the west of Scotland, and that's the music you play. Gaelic harmonica and other sorts of traditional Scottish music. So maybe talk a little bit about the west coast of Scotland and where you're from and the music tradition around there.

SPEAKER_01:

I come from a very small part of Argyll, the Firth of Lorne, which is a small village, Bendeloch. It's north of Oban in the West Highlands. The son of a labourer, we were just ordinary working people and an aunt sent me a harmonica for my Christmas once when I was the age of four. We weren't in the tradition of exchanging presents. We couldn't afford it at the time and I've always had a harmonica since. I never took it seriously, however, until much later in life. Sometimes I would sit at the fireside with my mother, who played the harmonica. We played pipe and Gaelic music together. And sometimes a bit of ragtime, a bit of country, or a bit of pop. And that was that. It was a tremolo that I was sent at the time, because I didn't know that's what they called it. It was a tremolo harmonica I always found enjoyment with when playing and throughout my life.

SPEAKER_00:

So about the West Coast of Scotland and the Gaelic influences, some of the people listening who aren't from the UK, I mean, that's a very beautiful part of the UK and a very beautiful part of the world. And, you know, the scenery there and the landscape, I think, plays quite a significant part, doesn't it? Is that something, you know, maybe gets into the music?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, there are particularly slow pieces. I love my favourite tempo is the slow ear. And a lot of our slow airs, they are a broken heart all over the world. There's emigration and reflecting on the country they came from. And there is the beauty of the surrounding area. And so many of our lovely slow airs, and we have quite a lot of them, they are pertaining to the love of one's domain, where there's mountains and sea and what have you.

SPEAKER_00:

And then perhaps explain a little about the term Gaelic, because Gaelic is the language and it influences the music.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the language itself is ancient. It's very, very old. We got it originally from the Irish and it's way back in history that it came from. And it's a very innocent language. I don't think there's any foul language like we have in different languages, the swearing. If somebody swears in Gaelic, it's very mild. It does offend anybody so it's a very innocent language and it's a very natural one people feel what they're saying at the time very much there's a lot of emotion goes into it and humour incredible humour as well but light humour not heavy stuff that is difficult to understand it reflects a way of life which is extremely rural small crafts where people would help each other the ethos of profit making didn't come into the culture until probably the 20th century with television and radio etc etc so commercialism it came in a wee bit you know but basically at the root of the language is a lovely lovely genuine innocence

SPEAKER_00:

beautiful yeah and that maybe reflected it in the music so again you're from the west coast of Scotland so what about the music scene and the sort of the Scottish traditional music scene around there and the instruments played and how you got interested in all

SPEAKER_01:

that at a very early age my mother He loved music and all we heard was the name Bobby McLeod. Now you may have heard of Jimmy Shand and quite rightly he was on the east coast of Scotland. He was a fantastic player. He had his own band and he travelled the world and he was well known down in England and Australia, New Zealand, you name it. However, we had Bobby McLeod on the west coast.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC

SPEAKER_01:

He's regarded as being the person who took bagpipe music and Gaelic music and particularly focusing on that music on the accordion, on the piano accordion particularly. And there were others who then started to copy Bobby and the whole country. Now, the young ones, there's many, many, many young ones playing the accordion. So the first influence on me musically was Bobby. The music of people like Bobby McLeod who played accordion. So when I got seriously interested in the harmonica was many years later, to be 27 years ago to be precise, an accordion player called Phil Cunningham, who is hugely regarded both here and abroad. He's probably the most successful accordion player we've ever had. He was a musical director of a program, a Gaelic program that was going out on BBC. He asked me, that was in 1993. He came into a pub I was playing in for fun here in Glasgow. I learned a few tunes just for fun with a couple of guys from the Hebrides. And he heard me playing and he thought it was the right hand of an accordion he was hearing. Which didn't surprise me because that's what I was trying to emulate. So that was the influence on me for the harmonica was the accordion players. And there was an orthodoxy from the 50s. Do you think particularly the tremolo matches the sound of the

SPEAKER_00:

accordion over the other sorts of harmonicas?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, for me. I mentioned the Irish players. The Irish players play mainly what we call the two-roll button box, box being an affectionate name for accordion. And they play incredible stuff. But the sound of the reed, the way they're tuned, is quite different, very often, to the piano accordion. So I play the echo harp series, the old echo harp series that had been on double sides, that had been on the go for quite a few decades in Scotland, for Highland music. But when it comes to the Irish stuff I play I have a preference for the Japanese Suzuki and Tombow the sound of the reed is just that bit less soft a slightly harder sound but the sound it creates it's a lovely sound and it emulates the button accordion of the Irish for Irish music

SPEAKER_00:

So again, going back to when you started out playing, you got your first tremolo harmonica when you were four years old. And then from that age, you say your mother played, so that's fantastic. You used to play with your mother. So how did you evolve your harmonica playing then? Because obviously, as you mentioned, you didn't really seriously get into playing until the early 90s. So how did you develop your playing during that time?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I was coming from a very low base of playing anything in terms of ability or in terms of repertoire. I hadn't got many tunes, so I got the bug. It was like a drug. And it's so much so yet. I found that I got so much into it. I thought, if somebody of Phil Cunningham's calibre likes what I'm doing, I'm going to do something about it.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC

SPEAKER_01:

So I got really, threw myself into it. I contacted probably the most prominent record label in Scotland for traditional music, Green Tracks. And I contacted Ian Green, the sole director, and asked him if he'd be interested and I sent a demo. And he said yes. I then met one of the guests, we've got a couple of guests on it, one of them was an incredible musician and human being, Malcolm Jones, who was with, when I say was, they've now finished, they've retired, the Celtic rock band Drunrig, and Malcolm plays accordions, plays pipes, he plays drums, but particularly guitar. He's a world-class guitarist. He was on the album, and I ran into him again, and we formed a duo, and we played for about 13, 14 years together here in Germany, Denmark, and all over Scotland, particularly the Highlands. But he fell ill some years back, and he had to slacken off a bit with the workload, so I had to look for other people.

SPEAKER_00:

So this album was your first album? It was my first

SPEAKER_01:

one, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

In 1995, the West Winds album. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

West Winds,

SPEAKER_00:

yeah. So your first album, like many, you're dipping your toe in the waters. You met with Malcolm Jones, as you say, from Run Rig. How did that come together? You've got a very high-caliber musician to play with you on your first album.

SPEAKER_01:

How it happened was that there is no ego with Malcolm. You know, sometimes people who are held in very high esteem, sometimes in the education, they pick and choose people. and Malcolm does too to a degree, but he's very easy to get on with, easily approached, and someone who is very humble. It just clicked, we clicked, and I strove to create playing that was of a standard that was hopefully doing his some justice.

SPEAKER_00:

And so was that connection made through the record label initially? No,

SPEAKER_01:

it was through my having met him. He was contacted by the producer for a couple of tracks, and he said, we'll try and get Malcolm on, and I did, and I couldn't. believe malcolm jones and brandon were sitting in the bowels of the earth over in edinburgh in a tiny studio and he's sitting next to me and i think my god i was shaking like a leaf you know with nerves but it didn't take long to get to know malcolm and and we had and we still do i'm still in touch with him very much he is quite incredible

SPEAKER_00:

so to maybe that's a you know an indication you know the popularity of the harmonica because i don't think there's been a lot of scottish traditional music played on the harmonica are you one of the first maybe or are certainly best known at the moment.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yes, and I don't want to elaborate too much on this, but the tremolo players have been up against it with Richter tuning, you know, the German Richter tuning, which has a particular place. But we needed the Asian tuning, and very often the lower notes were not available on the Echo series particularly, which is the one mostly that the Scottish guys played. And they got fed up at times with just one note missing at the bottom end that meant that they couldn't always get the tune and it was no fault of their own so I think that therefore by definition there's been others that if they had non-rester tuning on the tremolos they might have done much more I was lucky I ran into an absolute gem of a guy again Rick Epping he lives in Ireland he's American he worked for Honour in Virginia he was the production manager in one of the factories there and I met him at a festival here in Glasgow and he said would you like to join the workshop I'm doing with Brendan Power and Nick Kinsella. And I did. And he knew that I had problems with the tremolo. I said, it would be nice to get the big one, the double-sided, done in the keys of A and D as well, because it was only available in C and G. Oh, he got me three or four dozen of them made, special order. So I'm the only one in the world with them. And that opened up a whole new world, because I could get the big one, the 57-120, it's the big tremolo, I could get that in C and G and A and D. So that's helped very much.

SPEAKER_00:

Did you play only tremolo on the Westwinds album or was there diatonics on there?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I didn't play much diatonic on it at all. If I played any, I don't think. I played the octave tuned on a couple of sets, but it was mostly tremolo.

SPEAKER_00:

So this album, it got you some exposure, yeah? Got you back to play at some festivals, you know, some gigs, got you some gigs, etc. So this is a bit of a springboard, this album. And you went on tour with Malcolm Jones as a result of recording that album. Yes,

SPEAKER_01:

yes. We toured the Highlands and Islands many, many times. And I also played in Germany with him a few times over to Germany and in Denmark in the Tuna Festival. It's a big traditional music festival there.

SPEAKER_00:

There's a few different styles on there. A nice song called Touch of Irish, which is good. Another one is Shetland Reels, which does some nice unison.

SPEAKER_01:

Shetland Reels, I love them. They're famous for the reels that Shetland does. There's a Nordic influence there. They play a lot of fiddle in Shetland. And there's some great players, one of them being Ali Bain. An album after that, a flow here they did, Hill Road album, Ali's in a couple of tracks with me. And he is regarded very, very highly again. And he duets with, coincidentally, with Phil Cunningham, who had me playing in the first place. Yes, I love Shetland music. I wanted to do some, you know, add a bit of diversity to the album. and just do different textures, different sounds, different tempos.

SPEAKER_00:

And then this led on to you doing your second album called Closer Home five years later, also with Malcolm Jones playing with you again, yeah?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I felt within myself as I was progressing a bit and playing with Malcolm, I thought I would love to do better than the first album I did. And then I was hugely fortunate to be in the company of Malcolm Jones, and I took advantage of that fact. And we did it as a joint venture, Donald Black and Malcolm Jones. And it should have been Malcolm Jones and Donald Black, but that's the way he wanted it. So we did it as a joint venture, and we were conscious of the fact that it would be nice to mix it with different tempos and different textures. He uses slide guitar on a couple of tracks, one in particular, a slow air we did, called Eilean Scalpe in Aherag. It means Island of Scalpe near Harris. It's in the Hippodese.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_00:

And again, like you say, lots of different tempos, textures. But I think what's interesting is to talk around some of the different forms of music. A lot of people are interested in playing traditional music now on the harmonica. So, you know, for example, you've got the two gyms, which is the Pipe March.

UNKNOWN:

Pipe March

SPEAKER_00:

You've got Kitchen Maid, The Thief and the Tailor, which is a pipe jig. So what about those pipe tunes?

SPEAKER_01:

Fundamentally, many pipe tunes have the flattened seventh, and it's referred to, I think, technically as mixolydian. Some of those tunes, not all of them, but some of them require a change in the tuning in one reed. I did it on one of the models, the tremolo models 5580, which was rifter tuned, but I changed the, in the key of A, at the top end, there was G sharp and the bottom end, G sharp. So I flattened those to G and that facilitated being able to play so many, many more pipe tunes that Heather 2 could not be played on the harmonica because that special note that was required for many of those tunes was simply not available.

SPEAKER_00:

So this is on a tremolo.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

So of course it's not possible to bend the tremolo, is it?

SPEAKER_01:

No. For one simple reason, the reeds would just buckle. You know, you put a lot of pressure on the reed when you're bending. If you're bending in the ten hole, you're putting a lot of pressure on the notes generally anyway. So when you go to bend it, you're emphasising it more and it would have damaged the reeds. It's not feasible.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the reeds are very delicate, aren't they, on the tremolo?

SPEAKER_01:

Very, very delicate, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Do you know why they are so much thinner than, say, diatonic reeds?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, for the sound. There's a lovely soft sound that comes from the tremolo. And the ones I mentioned for Irish music, the reeds are that bit thicker. So you're getting a more singular sound from the reeds. It's akin to the button accordion, which has got that different sound. It's a lovely soft sound, but the drawback is that they damage very, very easily, the tremolos, particularly. The Echo Series, not because they were badly built, the reeds, but just in order to get that sound, they had to be that bit thinner.

SPEAKER_00:

So you play quite a few different sorts of harmonica on the Close to Home album. So you play, obviously, tremolo, you play some diatonic on those, but you also play chromatic as well, don't you? So I think on, I'm probably mispronouncing this, but Aileen Accio, is it? Aileen Accio. It's not as it

SPEAKER_01:

looks, the pronunciation in Gaelic. I'm no expert in Gaelic. I can't speak the language. I never got the chance when I was very young. But my friends, many of them, speak the language. And they tell me that it's Aileen Accio, and it means island of mist. It's the Island of Sky, or Misty Isle.

SPEAKER_00:

You're playing chromatic on that one, aren't you?

SPEAKER_01:

I know. I was playing tin hole, but there was an introductory part where there was a question and answer thing done by myself and Malcolm before we launched into the melody proper. MUSIC PLAYS And it was to try and emulate the echo that you might get in the cooling mountains and sky to make it more atmospheric. So the chromatic was used for that, but I'm not a chromatic player, no. I respect chromatic players very much. The sound of the chromatic, generally speaking, doesn't suit me.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so you do that one and there's a 6-8 march and a horn pipe on there as a time for another tune also played on the tremolo. So what about 6-8 time? That's another time that maybe people who are interested in traditional music might find tricky to get to grips with. How do you deal with 6-8 time?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm at home with them. I love playing them. I find it easy because I whistle them to myself all day anyway. Very often I learn tunes or relearn them and keep them in my mind by whistling them. So it's no problem

SPEAKER_00:

So that, like you say, getting the tunes into your head, is that a really important part? I've heard from you that you don't read music, so you're playing all the tunes by ear, or you learn the tunes by ear, do you?

SPEAKER_01:

What I do is, I hear the tune, if I like a tune, or if I love a tune, I'll play it. If I don't really love the tune, I don't play it. So there are many, many, many tunes that are beautiful, and I thought it would be very better, so I thought, starting this, I wonder what I'll do for tunes. And there's so many, you don't know which ones to discard, because you want to record them all. So I try So the learning process was one of hearing the tune and then playing it over and over and over and double-checking it. I can't read music, but I can read it slowly. I've never taken on board to learn reading music, but I can check certain bits that I've got it right. If I suspect it, and I haven't got that quite right yet, I don't think, I'll check it against the dots, against the music. But once I've done that, I continue to play by ear. And when I do a concert, a full concert, concert particularly in village halls and in festivals it's usually three quarters of an hour or an hour maximum playing but when we maybe go to village halls we play two 45 minute slots and I play upwards of 55 separate tunes in a full concert and flow ears and fast stuff and the average average amount of parts in a tune is about three. So I've generally got between 55 and 60 tunes where the average contents of the tune in terms of what to learn is about three parts. So it's a lot of preparation.

SPEAKER_00:

I like to play some traditional music myself. I find sometimes that you can mix them up together. Do you ever have that problem where you're sort of mixing up the tunes?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, and I'll tell you a good story there. I played this Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow several times, and it's a big festival, as you probably know. And when we came off one of the nights, we came off stage, Malcolm said to me, you know, you played that set of two fours in the second half, two four marches, you played it beautifully. It's a great pity that it was the wrong tune you started off with. Now, a lot of the pipe tunes, they start off similarly, and it's like hitting black ice and getting all over the place. When you lose it, when you go off track, you're off track, and you've got to commit to what you've taken on, the wrong tune. It doesn't happen very often, but it did happen that night.

SPEAKER_00:

So another great song on there, and I'll probably pronounce this wrong again, is it the Balachulish song? Balachulish.

UNKNOWN:

Balachulish.

SPEAKER_01:

Wallaceville is a small village near, you've heard of Glencoe, you've probably been through Glencoe on the way up. It's a beautiful part of the world again, and it's a small village just at the side of the salt water as you go through the glen on the west coast that's north of Oban. I always had a love of Cajun music. Malcolm and I decided to try something like that, and I played the octet-tuned Hunter Comet. harmonica on that. And we're just thinking, what do we call it? I just came up with the idea, the Barleyhollow Stomp. We are Celts from the west coast of Scotland, but it was Louisiana type of music. So although some of the tunes emanated from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which is full of gales, and Malcolm wrote a couple of the tunes himself. But it was to try and emulate the Cajun sound. I don't know if we did it right or not, but that's the story.

SPEAKER_00:

And also, on the last track the home at last which is a kind of hidden track you played the little lady uh harmonica yeah uh which is a nice little four hole harmonica i saw you doing the trick where you uh you put the the little harmonica on the toothbrush and pretend to be brushing your teeth while you're playing the harmonica something like this

SPEAKER_01:

I've got it on the table here.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great trick. I'm going to steal that trick, Donald. I like that a lot.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what I do is actually say to an audience that hasn't seen or heard it before, I'll just say, I'm really sorry, folks. At the interval, I had to have something to eat and I must clean my teeth. So I take this in a toilet bag and they just say, what on earth is this guy about? And then they just love it. It's a novel thing. It's to entertain, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

So we'll move on to your third album, which is called, is it Keel Road? So Keel Road, I understand that's the road that you grew up in.

SPEAKER_01:

It's where I first saw daylight. It's a road in the village of Benderloch in Argyle, north of Oban. And the tune came into my head when I was practising with Donny, my guitarist now. Donny's been with me for quite some time. And I was practising in his house and we had finished our practice. We were relaxing. The tune just come into my head. And I thought it brought back memories of my grandparents there at New Year's. It was whiskey for the men and port wine or sherry, one sherry for the ladies. And they sat around the peat trier and sang songs and played music for a week. It went on day and night. And I was a child at the time and I remember vivid memories of that. And of course, at that time in the Highlands, there was no electricity. I was 11 before, 7 rather, before I saw electricity when we shifted to the lowlands of Scotland. So it was a more mystic faraway world then. And the lovely feeling of togetherness at the fireside, peak fire, that came into my head, that tune, and that's what it is.

SPEAKER_00:

So another song on this album is a first in the harmonica, I understand, a Pibroch. A Pibroch.

SPEAKER_01:

A Pibroch is actually, I call it Highland Blues. It emanated from the fireside. Somebody composing a tune about a lost love or immigration or whatever. Then the pipes were brought in a formalised, a lot of the music was formalised in the military pipe bands and all the different regiments had their own pipers, etc. Pibroch then was referred to as classical music on the bagpipes.

UNKNOWN:

Pibroch

SPEAKER_01:

I understand what people say when they say that, but I don't see it that way. It's been formalized a bit. There's a particular setting. There's what we call an urla. It's the grounds in the first part. Then it builds up and there's more embellishments and it becomes more complicated as it goes. I was just trying to prove to myself I could have a go at a pibroch. It had never been done in harmonica

SPEAKER_00:

before. And another song on there, which will be the introduction on the podcast, it's a classic Gaelic song, which is the cuckoo.

SPEAKER_01:

My mother sang that all her days, and I remember as a child her singing that in Gaelic. It comes from the Arnhemachan Peninsula, and it's about a woman speaking to the cuckoo, the bird, the cuckoo, probably in the month of May, when the cuckoo arrives with its beautiful song. And we're blessed up on the west coast there. We get a whole myriad of them suddenly arrive, and you can hear numerous ones at the same time. singing away and she was speaking to the broken heart her lover had left her in Gaelic she's really saying you are beautiful you come here with your lovely singing every year you come back and visit me but he's gone I'll never see him again and it's a sad song so normally that is sung quite faster but I like the slow the slow airs down a bit

SPEAKER_00:

and I'm talking about Gaelic so there is a there's a song sung in Gaelic on the album is that you singing who's singing that

SPEAKER_01:

one that's me having a go I'm not sure about how I succeeded with the language though. You know, I was advised by friends, fellow musicians and speakers of the language. I heard that since I was knee-high as well. My mother sang that all her days.

SPEAKER_03:

How

SPEAKER_00:

do you feel about the importance of preserving languages like Gaelic? I was reading about it early on that 58,000 people now speak Gaelic on the west side of Scotland. So keeping that tradition up, how do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_01:

I can't speak the language just because my parents left the Highlands and I would have heard it and learned it, no doubt. I've got to be realistic and say we're living in a much smaller world than before with communications. We can Zoom somebody in Texas and have a chat with them. It's the exact opposite of what it was in the Highlands and Islands. It was a very close community language and it was local. It was spoken nearly the whole of Scotland spoke Gaelic some centuries back. We call it Gaelic here. The Irish call it Gaelic. It's the same language. And the ancient kings of Scotland, the original ones, they came from Ireland anyway. So there wasn't such a thing as Ireland and Scotland. They were just Celtic Gaelic islands together. So there is a tremendous uniqueness about it. I think it should be preserved and spoken. But most people who speak it understand that it couldn't really work as the main language medium for conversing because English is spoken worldwide and we live in a world, a big world as well as our locality. So I see a place for it, however. I wouldn't like to see it dying out and not being spoken, but we've got the realistic at the same time.

SPEAKER_00:

What I find about your albums, moving on to the next one now, the Dreams and Dances album, they're very atmospheric. They do sort of summon, like you say, the misty outer sky. You can sort of picture that. They're very soothing and mostly instrumentals. Definitely it's got that nice mood to it, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I was pleased with that album. I thought we did well. My producer there was a young lad who works in a band called Tidelines, and they play all over the UK, and very soon they'll be all over the world. They're marvellous. It was broadly my own choice, you know, the material. I thought it worked pretty well. I've been lucky that I've always had good people with me.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and it really adds to the music. You say you've got some great musicians on there, complimenting the harmonica. It sounds great. And again, hopefully a testament to the appeal of the musicians liking the sound of the harmonica playing this traditional music so again you've got quite a few pipe tunes on there you've got um the clappers so

SPEAKER_01:

Do you know why I called it the clappers? Because there's a phrase here, it's a colloquialism, you know, oh, he was going like the clappers. He was going so fast. I'm playing them, they're jigs. And I know, I'm implicitly saying to the listener is, you think there's a bit in the fast side, I'm aware of it.

SPEAKER_00:

And you've got some barn dances on there. That's a dance tune. So have you performed these songs at dances?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I don't play at dances, but all these tunes will be played at dances. Oh, yes. I've concerts, you know, I can't play for dances because I would just be dead at the end of the night,

SPEAKER_00:

you know. A song on there is The Inevitable Journey and... You play a certain position on the harmonica. Do you want to tell us about that one?

SPEAKER_01:

The tune itself, The Inevitable Journey, is quite simple. The young lad that wrote it, he saw a tune being necessary just to refer to the people that left the Highlands and Islands over the last few decades, particularly coming down to the Central Belt, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and looking for work. So it was an inevitable journey. They couldn't find work where they were. So the Highlands were depopulated a couple of hundred years ago. There was the Highland Credences and the landed gentry. got rid of people, sent them out to America and Canada, and they replaced them with sheep. It was more economic to have sheep than human beings. That side of the Highlands, the depopulation still exists to this day. There's not a lot of work around. There's not many industries, so people have got to head down south. And that's what the tune's about. As far as the recording of the tune, I thought it was a good candidate for an experiment. I muck about for fun on second position playing, and play a wee bit of blues or whatever, just for my own enjoyment but there's other guys can do it much much much better than I however I wanted to try an experiment out and the guy who produced that he said to me I don't think this will work it's not it's not it won't work and I said can we try it just do it and see and he pieced it together and he said he shook my hand he said congratulations you were right you know it seemed to come out okay and the tune was fine for it it was a good candidate to take for that experiment so I'm underpinning it. I'm doing the second position playing on the ten-hole diatonic along with the trill in first position. And on the record, it goes from F into G, and then I go from G to A. And when I go to A, in comes the second position on a D ten-hole.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so a nice mixture of, like you say, harmonicas and positions there, yes. So following that album, in 2015, you had the great honor of appearing on the Charlie McCoy's Celtic Dreams album playing the song Lonesome Eyes so how did that come about?

SPEAKER_01:

How it came about was I was honoured twice actually to be invited I was over the last year in Oklahoma and I was invited to play at SPAR the Society for the Preservation and Advancement in the Harmonica, which, as you know, is a huge harmonica festival in the States. And Charlie was in the audience, actually, in our audience. I met him briefly. He was signing autographs and speaking to people afterwards. But I had a chat with him. And I'm a huge Elvis fan. I love highland music, of course. But as a young person growing up in the modern world, you're exposed to other things. And I just loved Elvis Presley. And I thought, this is somebody who's played with Elvis so much and so many other people. And I I didn't know how he would respond when I spoke to him. And he was lovely. A lovely, lovely man. So I kept in touch and one of the albums you mentioned there, I forget which one it is, I did a thing called Gaelic Country.

UNKNOWN:

Gaelic Country

SPEAKER_01:

And I sent Charlie out the album. I said... It's from Scotland, but you might be interested in it. You're an expert at country music. And he came back to me and he said, would you be up for doing that slow air together and put it on my next album, which was his then 37 solo album. I think he's done 42 or 43 thus far. And I couldn't believe it. Charlie McCoy, a marvellous world-class musician, who's probably, I think he is the most recorded in history. I was delighted and honoured when he asked me to send that out. So we sent it. out to Nashville and he did this thing in it. It's a lovely slow air by the late Jerry Holland from Nova Scotia. from Cape Breton, Ireland and Nova Scotia. He composed and played many, many fiddle tunes and it's a lovely thing. And I took it and slowed it down a little bit, slower than the Cape Breton people play it. I like to take the slow air slowly. And Charlie seemed to like it. He was really very complimentary and lovely about it. And he said, when you're doing your next one, I'll reciprocate. And I did that.

SPEAKER_00:

So did you record it remotely or were you in the same location physically when you did so?

SPEAKER_01:

We sent it out electronically. We took it from the guy young Ross I was talking about Ross Wilson he had all this stuff and he said I can send this out to Charlie and he could do his thing in it

SPEAKER_00:

yeah super and so as you say Charlie reciprocated by appearing on your most recent album From My Heart in 2017 yes That's the song New Island Waltz, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

The New Island Waltz, it was written by another talented guy who plays the accordion, Lear Douglas, and he's from Skye, the Island of Skye. He said to me at the time, the first one, he said, when you're doing your next one, get back to me and I'll reciprocate. So I thought, there's a country flavour to it. And I thought Charlie would do a good job. And he did a lovely, lovely job. And he harmonises beautifully with different harmonicas at the end, towards the end. I never in my life ever thought that I would ever find myself recording with somebody like Charlie McCoy.

SPEAKER_00:

Again, was this recorded remotely?

SPEAKER_01:

It was the same way. We sent it out to Nashville. And he put his stuff on it. Oh, no, I beg your pardon. There wasn't the final thing. The gaps were left for Charlie. In it, I play, Charlie follows, he plays the same notes, and we do the same with the B part, and then there's a guitar bit in the middle, and then we both come in at the end together, and he does wonderful cording on it. So the spaces were left by the producer, by young Ross, and they were exactly the length, and Charlie understood that well and did a lovely job. And I had the honour of meeting up with him and his wife. My wife and I went through to Edinburgh last year and we had dinner with Charlie in just up Princess Street in Edinburgh, yeah. And it was great fun, wonderful fun. No ego, no boisterousness. He just said to me before we parted, he said, I've been lucky in life. I've had a great life in music. I've been very blessed, very humble.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, he's a lovely guy, as you say. I had him on the podcast, so yeah. Yeah, I know. I had

SPEAKER_01:

a

SPEAKER_00:

great

SPEAKER_01:

interview with him, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. So, yeah, some more songs on there. You do a duetting with an accordion on the Highland Scottish, is it?

SPEAKER_04:

Highland Scottish, yeah.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_01:

It's simply a two-fold march played faster for dancing to. It's just taking that bit up in tempo. And there's certain tunes lend themselves more than others. There's a spring in the tune. It's a lovely dance. It's quite a difficult dance to do, actually. It's quite heavy on the feet.

SPEAKER_00:

Again, doing that duetting with the accordion, going back to your interest in the accordion when you first started playing.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's a young lad who I heard playing in the pub and I knew that Ross, that I was referring to, was moving on. He although he produced my stuff after that, you know, but Martin Skeen. And Martin's a multi-instrumentalist. He plays cello on an Irish low air on that album. He plays whistles, not on the album, but I know he plays whistles and he plays piano accordion and button accordion. And both are two different worlds of playing. If you play one, it's not necessarily the case you can play the other. And he plays keyboard, piano. He's just wonderful. I just love him to bits. So that's the guys I've got. I've got Donnie McKenzie who plays guitar and Martin Skeen. Please let

SPEAKER_00:

me. You've also got a polka on there as well, the Rockfield polka.

SPEAKER_01:

The Oakfield Polka, that was a band from Oban, Colin Campbell, and Colin sadly died of cancer, and that was the last recording he ever did. And apparently he was so ill that the shoulder straps that he's recording were sliding down his arm, he was so weak. And I think he was trying to say, you know, a lot of accordion players play continental stuff they play Swedish or they play German stuff and a lot of stuff they do is polkas and I think he was trying to say yes I play pipe and garlic stuff but I can play polkas as well so he wrote that tune and I loved it you know so we did that one it was a different dimension again it was a polka so

SPEAKER_00:

on one of the tunes Highland Express you start off with a bit of a bit of a blues riff

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yes. I didn't want to overdo it. I just did a touch of it, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, a lot of people I speak to on here, is blues something that you have listened to much, blues harmonica? Is that something you've tried to learn?

SPEAKER_01:

I haven't tried to learn it because there's a lot to it. There's a lot of great techniques. You know, I read about them and see them and hear them. I listen to them on Facebook. So many people corresponding, and particularly now the Harmonica UK, which was now the Harmonica League of Great Britain. I was down in Bristol twice, and I met so many of the brilliant players. And over in America, of course, you know, and it's lovely to run into people like Brendan Power, who plays first, second position, any position in harmonica, and brilliantly, you know. Yes, I admire

SPEAKER_00:

these guys so much. Well, it's nice that you put a little bit of blues on there, too. So that's your five albums, and obviously people can get hold of your albums through the website, and there'll be a link to the website on the podcast page, so people can check that out. It's

SPEAKER_01:

www.donald-black.com. There'll be some sets we've played and there they can hear as well, you

SPEAKER_00:

know. You mentioned your mother earlier on and you used to be with her and I think she was called Christina, was it? Christina, yes. Yeah, I understand you actually appeared with her on television when

SPEAKER_01:

she was 86 years old. Yes, she was 86 years old and, you know, her memory had gone and 10 minutes after that she couldn't remember having done it. It was lovely. I was looking at the footage there the other night, and it's quite emotional. And you know, we actually had a wee tune together on the two-roll button accordion as well, but that wasn't put on television. They chose to use the harmonicas. But we could have a wee tune, nothing fancy, just the two-roll button accordion, and then we'd have a tune on the harmonica together.

SPEAKER_00:

You mentioned you'd been to Spa. You were the first Scot ever to be invited to Spa, is that right? Yes,

SPEAKER_01:

yes. I'm very honoured about that. And we were asked back, and that's Some years back now, and there was problems with getting the necessary documentation to play in the States. So ultimately, I managed to go over to Belfast and got the right visa, short visa, just for playing at it. So we played twice. We played in Kansas City in 2005 and played in Tulsa last year. And we were given the banquet spot in Tulsa after the dinner, one of the spots in the banquet on the Friday night, the last night of playing. And we were very honoured, actually, we played in front of quite a crowd of people and a lot of top harmonica players in the audience so it was rather an honour and as it was down in Bristol to play down in Bristol in the Kelly House in Bristol twice for the National Harmonica League yeah and you played as you mentioned Earl Young you played in various countries obviously in Scotland in England Moscow outdoors in the back of a lorry in three feet of snow and 90 police to protect us the biggest audience I've played to thus far was 25,000 in football stadium in Lithuania and they went crazy after Gorbachev liberalized the Baltic states and they decided to go west so much so that they had a country festival and I contacted them online and I said I play Celtic music and a lot of the country music stemmed from Scotland and Ireland there was a great input from the people who emigrated to America there and they said would you come out so I went out with Donny and we played in front of 25,000 and they were doing the conga to one of the sets of rails we were doing in a dilapidated football stadium and they were lovely people and I went to Glasgow University to the Slavonic studies department to learn some of the language and write it down phonetically to speak to them in their own language and they went crazy they said we love your music but you spoke to us in Lithuanian and we probably enjoyed our time there yes and then there was a guy from Russia he invited us to Moscow we played in Moscow twice for St. Patrick's Day festival it wasn't Scott's festival it was in the month of March and it was a Incredible. I've actually got footage of inside the Kremlin. We went for a visit, as the public could then do, and now I've played Scotland Brave outside one of the cherished small churches in the Kremlin. And Ivan the Terrible and Frederick the Great and all these people are embalmed in the Kremlin. I didn't realise it was offending and I took the harmonica and I played Scotland the Brave and I've got footage of this guard with his big long grey coat blowing a whistle quickly and I had to stop.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, you've certainly got around with that harmonica. You also appear in four books on harmonica.

SPEAKER_01:

A couple of them I've just referred to very quickly. Winslow, yeah, he just briefly referred to me in his book and Winslow, I know Winslow, I've met him a couple of times now over in the States. He's incredible. He's really, really does know his stuff and hugely enthusiastic and I was rather honoured. He sent me a copy of it and signed it and Charlie in his book Fifty Cents and the Box Top it's called and the guy that wrote it for him said if you tell me of the people that have been on all your albums I'll mention the names of them. So in the middle of the book there's a photo of Charlie with Elvis and some other musicians and at the back of the book yours truly and I'm thinking I'm in the same book as Elvis Presley but there was a guy who a German a long time ago he did and he wrote a lot on harmonica Christoph Wagner and it's called Die Wundharmonika the Mautharmonika and he did quite a thing there and then of course the encyclopedia of the harmonica by the chap from Chicago Peter Cranford Peter Cranford

SPEAKER_00:

yeah and you've appeared on television quite a lot as well obviously in Scotland on the sort of Gaelic

SPEAKER_01:

well I haven't done so much of late but I did for quite a while yeah and there's been a lot of repeats particularly with Covid a lot of repeats on television so it seems that they're playing all that old stuff again with a lot of artists you know I'm getting a share of exposure again although I had a full head of hair then but I don't know

SPEAKER_00:

So we move on now to a bit more about the playing style. So I know you want to talk about the mouth vibrato that you use.

SPEAKER_01:

On the ten-hole, I do one on the ten-hole, and I'll just get one right now. And it was picked up by two people only that I've ever met that picked up on this. One was a friend of mine from New York, and he plays harmonica, and he used to play with the boss, Springsteen, in New Jersey, early days. And he was playing over in Glasgow, and he contacted me. He had bought my first album in the States. He said he would like to meet up. And we met up at the hotel and I was playing a slow air. And he said, you're playing a mouth vibrato. I said, I've never heard of it. He said, neither have I, but I'm calling it mouth vibrato. The other person that picked up on that was Phil Louis. He's in the National Harmonica League. And when I came off stage in Bristol, he said to the audience, did you notice he doesn't do the movement with his hands? So I find that I've got more control just doing it

SPEAKER_04:

like this.

SPEAKER_01:

There's no hands used there at all. It's just right at the front of my mouth. It's just part of the expressive thing. I just like doing it there, and they seemed not to have ever seen that before, for better or for worse. The other one, another thing I do is with a tremolo. I try to emulate the mandolin or the bouzouki or banjo, whatever, doing this.

UNKNOWN:

.

SPEAKER_01:

you would have noticed that the higher the note, the cleaner it

SPEAKER_00:

is. How are you making that effect?

SPEAKER_01:

Two aspects to that. One is that you pretend that it's a tremolo that's gone on, the big echo series, the biggest of the echo series, and you gently caress the harmonica, just lightly. And what you do after that is, you know how us Scots, we're very guttural with the consonant R. Maybe Germany and some of the Russians as well, they use the speaker R. If you do that correctly, and put your finger in front of your mouth and go... Successive small jets of air come out and it goes right into the slots and you're gently caressing a harmonica... I don't overdo it if I'm playing a set. I do a bit of it and go back to the ten hole probably if I'm playing a slower. But I switch to the tremolo for that effect. And it works to a degree.

SPEAKER_00:

It's something different. I believe you've also helped develop a Mixolydian tuned tremolo with Holner, the Highlander.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, the Highlander we took out I can't remember how many years back now. What we refer to technically is the 5580 that's determined by the amount of notes in it. The double-sided tremolo in the key of A and D. And on the A side, I took two G sharps, high G sharp and low G sharp, and made them G, and just flattened them to G by filing the reeds, because there's an integral part, one note of a pipe tune, many pipe tunes, that you cannot really play the tune unless you can get that, what we call, flattened 7. Here's an example. And that note... That is on the tuned harmonica. This is what it was on the Richter-tuned one, which I retuned myself.

SPEAKER_00:

You can hear the difference there. Good innovation, yeah. So obviously you play a lot of tremolo. A question I ask each time, Donald, is if you had 10 minutes to practice, what would you spend that time doing? So maybe for people who are interested in playing the tremolo, what would you do in your 10 minutes?

SPEAKER_01:

Accuracy. Now, there's different slots in the tremolo. The apertures where the reeds go into and people blow and suck, they differ from harmonica to harmonica. So you've got to get used to it. Some of them are quite small and the accuracy has got to be much greater for certain harmonicas than others because you can miss it. You know, you've got to watch your land exactly on it. So accuracy and really getting, once you, you know, people learn the scales, but they've got to get some music and I'm assuming that they're starting out. Play a tune you know, not something you don't know, and play something easier, like Jingle Bells. The first six notes are the same. There's a lot of the same note there, but you're beginning to play a tune. And once you've done that, go a bit more adventurous and do exactly the same again with a slightly more difficult tune. It might be best to play a slow piece that you know and know well you know it back to front and you know if you're playing it correctly if you don't so you try and find that note that you might not be getting correctly but take your time with it and don't worry about learning the whole tune maybe there may be three or four parts to that one tune even if you can get the first few bars to start with get the first part and go over it and over it and over it and then you work on the second part and then sometimes you forget the first part and then put the two together but don't worry about the third or the fourth they'll look after themselves once you're ready and just don't be afraid to expect and just see what you can do.

SPEAKER_00:

So, yeah, if we just move on to the last section now, we're talking a little bit through gears. We talked about, obviously, how you playing different types of harmonicas and tremolos and diatonics and even a bit of chromatic is important. So what is your favorite tremolo?

SPEAKER_01:

My favorite tremolo is the one that I've got a supply of. And I got those, I procured those because I knew that I might not always get them. I thought, well, just in case. And thank God I did because they were taken off the market. Horner took them and they're Horner they're tremolos and they have the faults the wood the wood swells up when you're playing too much with the saliva and can rip your face if you don't watch what you're doing but they have a lovely sound and it's always been the Horner tremolo I played so is that a model you can't buy anymore you cannot buy anymore they've taken well they've taken the Echo Heart series off completely and of course the Chinese have got a foothold now in Horner the crucial thing is nearly anyway that in the market the market that they supplied because Because of the pop cult and because of large volumes of sales, in 1987, Horner sold a billion harmonica, and most of these were ten holes. So they shipped stuff out to the States, and as you know, the African-Americans very intuitively discovered that if you play these in second position, my God, you can play blues. And then it took off. So harmonica companies, particularly Horner and one or two others, they were quite understandably focusing on ten hole, and chromatic as well. So the tremolo was regarded as as a toy rather than a musical instrument for quite some time. There always have been this sort of poorer relation in attention by the companies. So I feel that more attention might be, you know, because they play them all over Asia. It's Asian tuned is when you get rid of the tuning. I just was fortunate in the sense that I purchased enough that will see me out. You know, I've got quite a lot of them. But they don't last long because of the very thin reed. And the other one is a It's luck with saliva. Salivation is one's salvation. We're playing the harmonica because the wood that's used now swells up and it can rip your face open nearly. You know, it's really stiff on the lips. So in order to hit that note accurately every time, you've got to perpetually salivate just at the right time for each note, you know, and that's impossible. But what I do is I've got a sponge and a tray and water and I tell the listening audience to say, this is full of the finest malt whisky from Scotland and as the night goes on it gets much better for me and much worse for you and of course it's water I'm dipping it in but then if I make a mistake I'll say to them anybody spot the mistake that blooming whisky again but there is a serious side to it and it is when you tackle tunes that these have never been meant to be played in a harmonica a lot of these tunes were for fiddle or bagpipes you're not running out of saliva when you're playing the pipe and on the fiddle either And they're not easy instruments either. But I chose to do this, and I'm not complaining. It's been wonderful experiences with people that I never thought.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and what about what ombuds you're using? Are you puckering when you're playing the tremolo?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I just do as I feel. I try and accommodate, to some extent, the shortcomings in the harmonica. I mentioned the wood swelling and whatnot. But I try to accommodate the type of instrument it is. It's inside your mouth and all the time. It's horizontal action rather than blowing or sucking out the It's a different type of instrument. It's very physically close to you, and it's very emotionally close to you. But I just do as I feel within the confines of what the instrument will allow me to do. I just sometimes get carried away, and I love getting carried away. You know, I love slow airs.

SPEAKER_00:

And when you're playing, a microphone you use? It's

SPEAKER_01:

an SD, a normal microphone. I don't use anything with any changes whatsoever. Straight into the mic. And I've got to be conscious of the fact that when I'm playing... that we can get carried away and come away from the mic too much or too near. So I've got to self-discipline, make sure I'm a constant distance from the mic and express at the same time. Do

SPEAKER_00:

you use any effects? No, none. Great. And then, so final question, Donald, what are you planning to do? Hopefully we're getting good news now on the pandemic. Have you got some plans to get out there playing again?

SPEAKER_01:

I very much hope so. There's two factors. One is the pandemic and the other one is, well, I was supposed to be touring Michigan area roundabout and Toronto Ontario area this year but that fell through so hopefully we can travel we'll open up we can play there again but it's like a drug you can't let go and I still want to play and enjoy the music and the people I meet and the audiences we play to

SPEAKER_00:

yeah fantastic so hopefully you'll get out playing again next year so thanks very much Donald for joining me today it's been great thank you Neil I've certainly enjoyed it Thanks so much for listening, everybody. It wouldn't be the same without you, and thanks again for my sponsor, the Longwell Blues Company, helping me keeping this thing going. They build great purpose-built equipment for the harmonica, so be sure to check them out. Donald, take us to Bonnie, Scotland, with a slow air.

UNKNOWN:

MUSIC PLAYS Thank you.