Blues harmonica master Carey Bell died on May 6 of heart failure in his hometown of Chicago. He was 70. Bell – the 1998 winner of the Blues Music Award for Traditional Male Artist Of The Year – was a ...

Among the harmonica’s many wonderful and unique traits, there is this: You have to really suck to be good at it. As one of America’s finest and busiest harmonica players, Denver’s Ronnie Shellist ...

No one is going to mistake San Francisco for Chicago, St. Louis or Clarksdale, Mississippi, but the Bay Area has a proud and legitimate blues scene and annually puts on a show that will wow blues fans ...

I’m not an especially fervent advocate of blues harmonica, but I do love the greats—both the Sonny Boy Williamsons, Big Walter Horton, much of Charlie Musselwhite‘s innovative output. But for me no ...

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 ...

It’s been nearly 50 years since Chicago singer and harmonica player Billy Branch heard blues music for the first time as a 17-year-old student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Branch said it ...

Blues harmonica legend James Cotton died Thursday at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas. He was 81. The cause of death was pneumonia, according to Alligator Records, the Chicago label for ...

UPDATE: Mark Hummel’s Blues Harmonica Blowout tour, which was supposed to launch in January, has been postponed. New dates have not been announced yet. See markhummel.com for more information. The ...

You can be sure that folks on the historic downtown hotel’s patio were standing throughout the concert. Hummel expects the same when he and Funderburgh return for the 12th annual KXCI House Rockin’ ...

Austin, Texas, September 24-- Gary Primich, considered by many to be one of the greatest harmonica players in the world, passed away suddenly on September 23rd. Not only is this the loss of a ...

Kyle Edward Rowland was born on June 8, 1993 in Sacramento, California. One could almost say that Kyle has been playing the harmonica since birth; when he was just a baby, his father put a harmonica ...