“Classic Harmonica Blues,” out on May 21, features 20 tracks by the blues’ greatest harmonica players. Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings In the early 20th-century, southern black ...

Mark Hummel didn’t set out to be an impresario. He had no burning ambition to corner the market on the world’s greatest blues harmonica players. But after getting a bracing shot of energy from ...

There are myriad reasons why playing music is one of the most enjoyable and spiritually beneficial things to do on earth. Melody, rhythm and lyric are but three glorious aims. One drawback to playing ...

It’s as if, his mother says, “some old bluesman got ahold of him and took him away.” That would explain everything — the school problems, the lawyers, court and jail. It would also explain how that ...

First as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins and later on his own, he was one of the best-known musicians playing the style known as the Piedmont blues. By Clay Risen Phil Wiggins, a harmonica player ...

James Cotton, who learned to play the harmonica as a child in the Mississippi Delta and went on to be a major figure in blues music as a sideman to Muddy Waters and as a Grammy Award-winning solo ...

Tony Glover, a harmonica player who as a member of the group Koerner, Ray and Glover was at the center of the folk music revival of the 1960s and helped introduce a new audience to the blues, died on ...