As the founder and blues-drenched harmonica master of the King Biscuit Blues Band for 20 years, Ken Schoppmeyer was known as a perfectionist. If a band member played a sour note, he’d sternly, and not ...

In the mid-1800s, a German harmonica manufacturer named Hohner started exporting his product to North America. Being relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to play and extremely portable, the ...

If you ask James Montgomery if he remembers playing the Shaboo inn in Willimantic back in the day — the legendary local club that closed in 1982 — he’ll hem and haw and scratch his head and say “The ...

The gift Miles Guzman got for his 13th birthday would outline the trajectory of the rest of his life. A simple $10 harmonica. Guzman, who grew up in Loveland, says he decided he wanted to be a blues ...

How band came together: I [Supra] finally found 3 guys, or I should say they found me, who are some of the finest musicians I have ever come across. Our best original song: We are still working on our ...

Brody Buster performs as a one-man band before a Royals game at Kauffman Stadium in June. It's been twenty years since Brody Buster's first round of glory days — when he was a 10-year-old blues ...

Harmonica Shah has been a fixture on the Detroit blues circuit for at least 20 years and has been featured on a number of recordings with other local blues artists such as Hastings Street Grease. Shaw ...

At a young age, the soul of the blues grabbed Eric VonHerzen by the collar and shoved itself into his pocket. In Orange County during the early ‘70s, there probably weren’t too many kids who needed it ...

Hear Brandon Bailey perform two songs live in the NPR studio. The harmonica is a staple of American blues, beginning with the Memphis jug bands of the 1920s. In the 1960s, blues-influenced artists ...

Frank “Iron Jaw” Oakley, L.C. Gant, and Dawayne Gilley at the Grand Emporium LaBudde Special Collections One night in 1965 inside an old club at 12th and Vine, Frank “Iron Jaw” Oakley asked Kansas ...

Blues harmonica virtuoso and onetime Muddy Waters sideman James Cotton died on Thursday at a medical center in Austin of pneumonia. He was 81. A rep for the musician confirmed his death. Cotton, who ...