by Jeff Horton
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T H E B L U E S
They are always there to characterize you instead of to say, “Hey, man, do it the way you feel it.” It’s always good to think somebody’ll hold out a hand or you admire this person’s way of doing things, whether
there was a style development or not. All that’s good, but you can
overdo things sometimes. Like a lot of today’s music, for instance, it can be overproduced. People like to have onstage what they use in
the studio to record with. It’s a real simple thing, like when you pass a note or a diagram or a sheet to a sound person to what to use. You could cut that stuff raw and for all the added sounds and stuff, just pass it to the engineer. That’s when he goes to work. From the way
it’s all recorded now, all an engineerman has to do is just switch the machine on, if he got the levels and everything set. You could just
record it raw and later on add on all this other stuff. Pretty soon it’s the engineerman who’s making your record. He can make it or break
it. It’s almost like it’s the record companies that’re making the records, not the musicians.
I never thought much of a person who can see you onstage and
watch how you are operating your instrument, and after you get
through playing the instrument, then you gotta stand around and talk about it with him all night. I’ve never been that way. But it works for some, and for some, it don’t. Some people can do it forever. I don’t see no reason why they should, but that’s the way they do it. They want
to see what kind of amplifier you’re playing through, see what kind of guitar you have. You find that amongst guitarists more than you do
any other instrument. Saxophone players, wind instruments, they do
their thing, then they all may go talk about some arrangement, but
they don’t go, “Man, why do your horn sound different from mine?”
You never have that said, simply because you’re a different person even though you’re playing the same instrument. There’s gotta be something different, even if it’s nothing but the tone. But if it blends in together, and it works with what’s going on, hey, you did a milestone.
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A lot of times people will ask me, why do I cover this song or that
song, instead of doing something original. Covering songs is some-
thing I never did like to do, but if I happened to cover something that somebody else did, I always liked to put some emphasis on it to make it my own. But after that, I might want to do a song of my own making. The way I would go about writing a song, it don’t have to be, but it could be, about something you see happen to a woman and a man.
Or you could be down on your luck. Or it could be about a little funny thing that you see happen to somebody else. To keep from forgetting
it, I would jot it down in my mind. If I see something else that strikes my attention, I get it written down by somebody right away, and I
keep on working on it until I get to what I think is the perfect song.
I was able to use either a typewriter or a Braille writer to write
down my songs. I had learned to type on both when I was at Piney
Woods. Then I would get somebody to help me. I would read out loud
what I wrote down in Braille, and they would copy it down by hand or with a typewriter. But lately I haven’t felt up to writing it down myself, so I would get someone to copy it down for me. I would just tell them the song lyrics, and they’d write it down. How I’d remember a song,
I’d sing it to myself so many times until I got it locked in, that this is what I’m going to remember. I did all of it from memory.
The main thing is, whatever you do, use your strongest effort to
try to make it better. I may go through ten or twenty pages to write one song, but that’s what it boils down to. A lot of musicians will use a piano or a guitar or some kind of instrument to help them work up a
song. But I do it different. I don’t even use a harp. I just mostly would hum the melody to myself and work up the instrumentation later on
with who I’m going to get to do it with me.
One of the writers for Southwest Blues magazine here in Dallas, Miss Joanna Iz, helped me to prepare all seven original songs I did
on my new CD. It’s called Coming from the Old School. When I went
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into the studio at Electro-Fi Records up in Canada to record the CD, I would hum the music line to the band and just sing the words. I
already had the melody in my head, and they would pick it up. We
would work up the arrangements from there. It took us only three
days to record that CD.
It was a lot different when I recorded some albums for TJ Records.
That was Tom Boyd’s label, back more than twenty years ago. On the
first one, it was just me and a friend of mine, Tommy Lee Thompson.
I played harp and sang, and he played the guitar. It was called Down Home in Mississippi. The engineerman had one of those portable studio things, and we went over to Tommy Lee Thompson’s house and
recorded these songs out in his garage. “Bad Acting Woman” was one
of them, and then I did a couple of instrumental things on the chro-
matic. Later on Tom took it back to California where he was living to mix it and put it on a record. It did about as well as it could, with just the two of us. I did about three or four more with his company. Now, he’s not even in the business anymore. The last I heard, he was a
computer programmer out in Palo Alto, California.
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C H A P T E R 1 0
THE HARMONICA
Even though Sam started out playing the trumpet and the drums, he is now far better known as one of the blues world’s premier harmonica players. He received the W. C. Handy award in 1988 for Blues Instrumentalist of the Year—Other (Harmonica). The harmonica, or harp as it is more commonly known in the blues, is a deceptively simple instrument.
Because of its small size and the way it is played, the observer often cannot really discern just how a harp player is applying a given technique.
The observer can only rely on his or her ears to tell if what the harp player is doing is to the listener’s taste. This chapter delves into some of the intricacies of Sam’s harp technique, supported by analysis and com-mentary by Brian “Hash Brown” Calway, one of the most popular and knowledgeable harp players in Dallas, Texas.
I got my harmonica playing style by not copying nothing from
nobody. A lot of guys who blow harmonica will listen to another per-
son to get their niche. But I didn’t do that. I started out as a trumpet player, and I would use horn lines on the harmonica, transposed.
That’s how I learned it, because I knew more about other instruments than I did the harp. I don’t know about Sonny Boy Williamson, but
Little Walter, he did the same thing with the saxophone.
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That’s why his style was so unique. Sonny Stitt was one of Little
Walter’s idols. When Walter wasn’t working in Chicago, and if he went to where Stitt was blowing, he would always keep some of Sonny’s
notes in his head and then he would go back home, or maybe go to
where a band was playing, and he would remember those notes. He
would transpose it from the saxophone to the harmonica. Then the
next time he’d have a rehearsal or just be practicing, he would try
those same riffs and notes and would work it into his harmonica.
That’s why his style was so great. If other harmonica players would do the same thing, they could have the style just as good. It may not be no greater, but it could be just as good as his. That’s the way I’ve been, ever since da
y one. I started out as a trumpet player, but a lot of the notes that I play, it don’t sound just like a straight run harmonica.
There’s a whole lot of harmonica players that think they are playing the blues. But they don’t play no classic stuff like “Stardust” or “Misty.”
That’s where my style veers away from a lot of that.
I never did sit down and have somebody teach me how to blow
one; I mostly did it on my own. By listening to me play, you would say my style of blowing might sound somewhat like what the next person
was doing, but I have different phrases than the average harmonica
player. That’s how I built up my own style. I never did listen to recordings and try to play along with the patterns, but I would sit down and listen to stuff if it was something that I might want to hear. But I never did try to play like anybody else.
Most harmonica players will blow in and out about the same,
but I more or less breathe out, not so much breathe in, through the
harmonica. I try to be careful in breathing between notes, because it might get connected to the notes. Breathing out more than in gives
me more volume and more bottom end. You won’t hear me breath-
ing through the harmonica, because I learned to control my wind. If
you use just what wind you need to use, you don’t have to breathe so
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loud and heavy for your next approach. And a lot of harmonica play-
ers, when they take their break, they play too many notes, like they be playing a guitar solo all over the place. I try to make my breaks support the rest of the song, to be more melodic and not be jamming or
jazzing. I’m about the only one who does it that way. I’m not one of those lazy players who you see singing or playing the blues. Instead of expressing themselves or the words they’re singing, they’re just like somebody who’s reading a True Detective magazine or something.
I really don’t like playing the harmonica. Everybody expects to
see me doing it, so I want to make my audience happy, but I just don’t enjoy playing it like I used to. I depend on my voice as a singer. If I had a choice, I would just sing and not play as much harp. It gets me bent sideways when somebody sees me when I’m out and they say, “Hey,
man, where’s your harp?” If you see a carpenter out somewhere, do
you say, “Where’s your hammer?” But I don’t have to depend on being
a harp player; I’m first a singer. I don’t have to fall back on it, like a guitar player or a piano player has got to do.
Unlike a lot of harp players, I don’t like to blow a lot of stuff in the same key. I like to blow in all the standard keys, if I can, and play the chromatic, that’s the big long one with the button on the end. I can take a chromatic, and if the guitar player is pretty shifty about what he or she is doing, I can take that chromatic and make it sound like a big orchestra. Playing chord riffs, stuff like that. But the harp players who play in just one or two keys, after a while it sounds like they’re playing the same song. On any night, I might play in about five different keys: A, C, then G, then that’ll put you in a D. I carry seven harps in my sash, I fill all the pockets up. But usually I play four harps in a night.
They are A, B-flat, C, and G, they’re the ones that I blow the most.
Sometimes, if I’m playing a slow blues, I’m going to add the harp
part to it where, a lot of times, there’d be a guitar. I can change keys without changing harps, depending on what the song is. That’s called
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blowing cross. I’d be using an A harp, and the next harp would be an E. But if I start in the natural key of A, then I’d be blowing cross into E, like a Jimmy Reed style. I do that by blowing down instead of out.
You can do that with a C harp and draw in with the key of G. A B-flat blows out B-flat, and when you suck in, it’s F. And then you can go to what is called the third position and you would be in the key of C. It’s really strange how it all works.
H a s h B r o w n :
I lived with Sam for two years and took a lot of lessons from him and asked a lot of questions about his playing. He started playing trumpet when he was really young, and I think that helped develop his harmonica playing style in a lot of ways. His phrasing, his note selection, and the fact that he doesn’t use a lot of vibrato like a lot of harmonica players do.
He’ll use what’s commonly referred to by harmonica players as a flutter, which is a shaking of the head back and forth to make two notes move.
A vibrato is done by a shaking of the hands instead of the head.
There are two different schools of thought on harmonica playing.
One way is to play purse-lipped, where you keep your tongue off of the harp to get your sound. The other way is to use your tongue to block the notes. A lot of players from Sam’s era either used both methods or did a lot of purse-lipped playing. I believe Sonny Boy Williamson used the first way and Rice Miller used both. Sonny Terry would use more purse-lipped than using his tongue on the harp. Sam always leaves his tongue on the harp when he plays, which makes his approach a little different from those players who split between purse-lipped and using their tongues.
Sam mentioned to me once that he likes Sonny Boy a lot more than he likes Little Walter. But he listens to so much music, that I know that from playing with him over the years so many times that he probably knows every Little Walter song inside and out, all the lyrics, and all the harmonica riffs. I’ve tried to stump him numerous times when he’d come play
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with us. I’d pull a song out and just start playing it, and he’d know all the lyrics, the arrangement of the song, and where all the harmonica licks were and what they were. He is very well studied because he has a very, very well-developed ear in that area. A lot of people think he tends to get crotchety when he’s onstage, as far as what he wants and what he doesn’t want. I think that’s because it’s hard for him to communicate what he does want. He’s really adept at playing Chicago and Mississippi shuffle style blues. If someone doesn’t know the style, or isn’t used to that kind of playing, he may come across as being kind of heavy-handed in trying to tell them what to do. A lot of people misunderstand that as Sam just being a jerk about it. I don’t see it that way at all. I see it more as when Sam tries to communicate what he wants, he’s more old school about it than some people would like him to be, because they’re not practiced in those styles. He’s very old school in a lot of ways, as far as hearing something he doesn’t like. He would definitely say something about it pretty quick.
His harmonica style to me is classic, late-1940s-to-1950s Chicago-Mississippi harmonica playing. Some of the other players in that style would be Snooky Pryor, Little Walter and Big Walter, Rice Miller, and Billy Boy Arnold. There are quite a few players who play in that style of harmonica language, as I would call it. That’s not saying that Sam couldn’t write a modern tune, but rather that he’s decided to carry on those styles. He’ll be modest and say that he doesn’t really play that much harmonica, but he really loves it and he does have a unique way of running his phrases. In other words, he doesn’t just copy someone else’s style on the harmonica. He might hint at some Little Walter or Sonny Boy Number One or Rice Miller, but overall it’s a uniquely Sam Myers sound in the way he plays.
He’s told me a few times that he got to play quite a bit with Jimmy Rogers. Sam hung out with Jimmy more than Muddy Waters, because
Jimmy went out of his way to befriend Sam when he moved to Chicago.
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So I think that the harmonica style that Sam developed had something to do with the time he spent playing with Jimmy Rogers. He did play some harmonica when he was with Elmore James, but I think he did more drum work with Elmore th
an anything else. He told me that during the sessions he did with Elmore for “Poor Little Angel Child” and “Look on Yonder Wall,” where Elmore was playing guitar, Sam played harmonica on several songs that were never released.
Sam developed a unique way to get a very, very fat tone by using the air within his hands cupped together. The way he does this is to turn the amp up a little hotter and then not blow as hard through the harmonica, and use his hands to squeeze the air tighter around the harmonica. That gives it a fatter and fuller sound.
Sam’s years of playing trumpet probably influenced his harp playing.
A lot of harp players also played other wind instruments like the trum -
pet or saxophone. If you listen to some of Sam’s early work, the way he phrases the harmonica is probably imitative of his phrasing on the trumpet. He uses a lot of short, staccato style phrasing, with no vibrato at the end of the notes. He will use vibrato from time to time, but of all the harmonica players I’ve heard, he’s one who does not rely on a lot of vibrato to end his phrases.
A lot of harmonica players nowadays like to play with more of a
distorted sound, but Sam comes from the old school where his sound comes through a clean amplifier, even if it’s a Fender Bassman amp. He’ll push the sound of it a little bit by cupping and squeezing his hands and get a little bit of distortion that way, but the sound that comes out of his amp is almost always very clean, fat and full. Sam will direct the airflow when using tongue-blocking by placing his tongue to the left side of the reed that he’s going to blow out of, and the side of his mouth to the right side of the hole. Sometimes he’ll put his tongue in the center and suck or blow out of both sides of his mouth to get a chord. But when he’s playing single notes, he’s blocking all the air off with the side of his mouth on one
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set of reeds and using his tongue to block the other reeds, and he’s blowing through just one, or maybe two, reeds at a time. This gives him a sort of a Louisiana or Mississippi country kind of style, which is a really nice effect.