The Return of the Harmonica

In the 1970s, Hohner, the world’s largest harmonica manufacturer, changed its flagship model,
and in the process its signature sound. A few musicians and harp customizers waged a quiet
rebellion. And they won.

Lee Oskar, seen here performing with WAR in 1970, was so frustrated with the quality of
Hohner's harmonicas at the time that he eventually founded his own harmonica company. (Photo
by Michael Parrish)

In the late 1960s, as the general manager of Don Wehr’s Music City in San Francisco, Reese
Marin sold guitars, drums, keyboards, and amps to the biggest psychedelic rock bands of the late
1960s. His customers ranged from Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver
Messenger Service to Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Guitarists as musically diverse
as Carlos Santana and Steve Miller could find what they were looking for at Don Wehr’s; so did
jazz virtuosos George Benson and Barney Kessel, who would walk down Columbus Avenue
from Broadway in North Beach—where the jazz clubs competed with strip joints for tourists—
whenever they were in town.

These legends were some of the most demanding and finicky musicians on the planet. So it
should have been easy for Marin to sell a couple of $5 harmonicas to Lee Oskar, whose melodic
riffs on hits like “Cisco Kid,” “The World is a Ghetto,” and “Low Rider” gave one of the biggest
bands of the 1970s, WAR, its signature sound. Oskar, however, heard imperfections in his
chosen instrument that Marin didn’t know existed. Oskar was not tentative in his quest for what
he considered a “gig-worthy” harmonica. “I spent all my money on harmonicas,” Oskar told me
recently, “just to find 1 out of 10 that was any good.”

The Hohner Marine Band was introduced in 1896 and is probably the most commonly played
harmonica in the world, which is why shortcuts in its manufacturing process had such profound
repercussions.

Marin says Oskar was exaggerating, but not by much. He was actually behind the counter when
Oskar made his first of many visits to Don Wehr’s and asked to play all of the harmonicas the
store had in stock in C, A, F, G, and E—the keys where rock bands live and die. On any given
day, Marin maintained an inventory of 10 to 20 harmonicas in each key for each model they
sold. That was a lot of harmonicas for Oskar to put his mouth on, so Marin decided to be firm. “I
said, ‘You can’t play ’em unless you buy ’em,’” Marin told me, “and he said, ‘I don’t mind.’”

Shrugging, Marin rang him up, then Oskar proceeded to play every single harmonica on the sales
counter, which he then divided into two piles—one for the gig-worthy harmonicas and another
for the rejects, which were 80 to 90 percent of the total. “When he was done, I said, ‘Lee, what
do you want me to do with all these harmonicas?’ and he said, ‘I don’t really care. I can’t use
them.’” Marin ended up giving away a lot of used Lee Oskar-played harmonicas. “Lee did this
over and over, every time he was in town,” says Marin. “It was crazy.”

Until relatively recently, playing a harmonica was sort of crazy, too, since doing so was
essentially the same thing as destroying it. For harmonicas like the Hohner Marine Bands Oskar
road-tested that day at Don Wehr’s, a player’s saliva would soak into the wood inside the
instrument, causing it to swell. At the end of a gig, the wood would dry out and shrink. This
process would repeat itself over and over, until the wood had swelled and shrunk so many times
it would split and splinter, often causing a player’s lips to bleed. “I used to hack off the ends of
the combs on my harmonicas with a carpet knife,” recalls Steve Baker, a London-born
harmonica player and an authority on the Marine Band. Most players would never do that, of
course, content to just toss their worn-out wrecks in the trash.

When players performed with their harmonicas, the wood inside would soak with saliva, dry out,
and shrink. This process would repeat itself over and over, until the wood had swelled and
shrunk so many times it would split and splinter, often causing a player’s lips to bleed. “I used to
hack off the ends of the combs on my harmonicas with a carpet knife,” recalls one player.

For Hohner, this must have seemed like a very good business model. After all, the Marine Band
had been Hohner’s most popular harmonica brand almost since 1896, the year it was introduced.
In the United States, in the first half of the 20th century, American folk musicians and blues
artists alike embraced the Marine Band as their own, giving the instrument originally designed to
play traditional German folk tunes an aura of cool. With sales soaring after World War II,
Hohner found itself making an instrument everybody wanted, even though it needed to be
replaced regularly. How could a manufacturer’s product get any better than that?

Well, answered harmonica players and a small but influential community of harmonica
customizers, how about an instrument that doesn’t wear out, is built to be serviced and tuned to a
musician’s needs, and is made out of materials that don’t cause our lips to bleed?

In the 1970s, Lee Oskar and Steve Baker were at the forefront of a movement to get those
questions answered. In Baker’s case, he’d been playing Hohner Marine Bands—sold in the U.K.
as Echo Super Vampers—since 1969, when the harmonica was known for its rich, accordion-like
tone. By the mid-1970s, though, Baker detected something dreadfully wrong with his beloved
harmonica. So did his fellow members of Have Mercy, a country-blues-punk jug band that
boasted three harmonica players (“maybe three and a half,” Baker says). With so many lips in
contact with so many harmonicas, Baker and his mates were particularly well attuned to the
quality of the Marine Band, which in their professional estimation had gone seriously south. “All
of a sudden they were easy to blow out if you played them too hard,” Baker recalls. “We were
trashing quite enormous numbers of them, boxfuls.”

Baker didn’t realize it when Have Mercy was destroying all those harmonicas, but he would soon
become a catalyst in a three-decade struggle to save the Marine Band. His transformation began
in 1976, when Baker and Have Mercy decided to try their luck in Hamburg, Germany, about 450
miles north of Hohner headquarters in Trossingen. Baker has been a resident of Hamburg ever
since.
Kinya Pollard, a.k.a. ''The Harpsmith,'' testing a harmonica in his workshop.

In Germany, Have Mercy signed on as Hohner endorsees, gaining the band access to Hohner’s
distribution outlet in Hamburg. Baker became the band’s designated harp buyer, which meant
he’d do what Lee Oskar had done in that San Francisco music store, except Baker’s shopping
sprees happened every few weeks, and in a warehouse filled with harmonicas. “I rejected 60 or
70 percent of them,” Baker told me over Skype recently. As soon as he had learned enough
German to communicate with the guys working there, Baker asked them the obvious question:
“Why don’t you make harmonicas like you used to? These aren’t the same.” The warehouse
workers, while polite, didn’t know, but they trusted Baker because of his status as a Hohner
endorsee, and relayed his questions and critiques to Hohner headquarters. Not much change
happened for a while, but Baker continued his conversations with the company. Eventually he
became a paid consultant to Hohner, acting as the conduit between players, customizers, and the
executives in Trossingen, a privileged relationship he has enjoyed for almost 30 years.

FOLK SONGS vs. THE BLUES

Knowing a guy in Trossingen, as it were, is not a bad thing if you are seriously interested in
harmonicas. Just ask Harland Crain of St. Louis, Missouri. He has 5,500-and-counting
harmonicas in his collection, thought to be the largest in the world. Probably 80 percent of these
instruments were made in Germany or Austria.

This very rare three-horn harp from Harland Crain’s collection was made in Klingenthal,
Germany, in the early 1920s by G.A. Doerfel and distributed in the United States by F. Strauss.

In the middle of the 19th century, Crain says, harmonicas were little more than glorified pitch
pipes, but by the late 1800s, harmonica makers in Germany, some from families of clockmakers,
had figured out how to turn the devices into actual instruments. Accordingly, many of the
harmonicas in Crain’s collection were made for traditional German folk songs, the 19th-century
equivalent of pop.

An inspired early performance from Motown legend Stevie Wonder.

Harmonicas with the same underlying design as the Marine Band were also sold as toys. Crain
has harmonicas in the shapes of zeppelins and pistols, pianos and guitars. He’s got harmonicas
with trumpet-shaped cover plates designed to amplify the instrument’s sound (“it didn’t work
very well”), as well as harmonicas with bells on them, so one could play a German folk song,
complete with accompaniment. Crain’s got Huck Finn harmonicas and Uncle Tom ones, too,
harmonicas designed to only play certain chords, and others made to play specific songs (one of
Crain’s favorites is a chord harp that’s good for little other than “God Save the King”).
The heyday of the harmonica, says Crain, lasted from 1910 to 1930, when some of the best
gimmick harmonicas were made. “I’ve got one called a coin harp, he says. “It’s a tubular thing,
about four inches long, and on one end it has a little spring-loaded compartment where you can
store five nickels.”

In parallel with manufacturers’ preoccupation with novelty and gimmicks, serious musicians in
the 1930s were pushing the instrument, particularly the Marine Band, to its breaking point,
tricking their harmonicas into hitting notes they weren’t designed to produce. As it turns out, the
Marine Band handled this punishment well, which is why between World Wars I and II, it
became the harmonica of choice among blues and folk musicians.

A short history of “America’s Harmonica Stars.”

According to Baker, the executives who ran Hohner during the 1970s didn’t understand what
made the Marine Band so appealing to serious musicians of this era. Little wonder, then, that
they didn’t appreciate the subsequent musical history their instrument had helped create (see our
sidebar, “America’s Harmonica Stars”).

“The Marine Band was the backbone of their business, it made Hohner’s fortune,” says Baker,
“but their view was, ‘What are all these black people in America, these rock-’n’-roll guys, what
on earth are they doing with our harmonicas?’” As Baker got to know the company better, he
realized Hohner was especially out of touch with the kind of music he loved. For them,
harmonica music was trios and classical music, with harmonica arrangements written for the
violin parts. “They thought the stuff people like me played—blues and rock ’n’ roll—was
horrible. At the time, they didn’t understand it, so they had no respect for it.”

THE SECRET TO A BENT NOTE

To understand why the Marine Band was such a favorite for musicians, it helps to know a little
about how the instrument works, beginning with a mental picture of its guts. The Marine Band is
what’s called a “diatonic” harmonica. It’s built out of five parts, which are stacked together like a
sandwich (in fact, “tin sandwich” is just one of the instrument’s colorful aliases, “Mississippi
saxophone” being another). In the center is the comb, on the top and bottom of which are two
matching metal plates; those plates have been punched with rectangular holes, which align with
the voids in the comb. Partially covering these holes are two rows of reeds, which vibrate in and
out of the holes to produce a harmonica’s sound. Cover plates give the player something to grip,
while openings at the back of the plates give the sound somewhere to go.

Pollard used a modified light box to check the gap between a reed and the slot it swings through.
Too much light means too much air is getting through. He looks for just a sliver of light, as seen
here.
No single component of the Marine Band can claim credit for its signature sound, but if any part
of a harp’s composition could be deemed especially critical, it would be the reeds. Unlike the
reeds in wind instruments like saxophones and clarinets, which are made of organic material like
bamboo, harmonica reeds are made of metal, usually the same stuff as the reed plate in which
they vibrate. “It’s a dreadfully complicated topic,” Baker says. There’s the reed’s composition,
how it’s hardened, and also its final degree of hardness. Lots of metals will work, but the degree
of hardness is different for each one. And the parameters for a given material—bronze, stainless
steel, or the brass alloys like Hohner uses—are very fine. “In the end,” Baker says, “it means
people are trying out lots of shit until it works.”

For some reason, Hohner got all of this right with the Marine Band, which may explain why the
company viewed with suspicion anything that did not conform to its sense of harmonica
perfection. “Bending” notes, for example, must have seemed an especially black art.

Bent notes are one of the most recognizable auditory tropes in the blues, and any harmonica
player who cannot get the note he’s playing to drop in pitch, or bend, might as well take up
German folk tunes. “Until I started working for Hohner, they didn’t even know what happened
when you bent notes,” Baker told me. Once upon a time, someone at Hohner must have
understood how it worked, but in the late 1980s, Baker was the guy who explained it to Hohner
again, right down to the physics of what bending does to the reeds (you can read his explanation
for yourself in “The Harp Handbook,” published in 1990).

From Hohner’s perspective, bending notes represented a malfunction of the instrument, because
it’s not what a Marine Band harmonica was designed to do. That, of course, does not mean it
cannot be done, as any blues player knows.

Randy Sandoval of Genesis Harmonicas makes harmonica combs out of Corian, a material most
people associate with kitchen countertops. It’s waterproof and can be sanded perfectly flat,
which gives it a tight seal.

The secret is in the reeds, two of which block the air in every hole, or channel, of a diatonic
harmonica like a Marine Band. For those reeds to work together, the player needs to go for the
throat—literally. In order to bend a note, a harmonica player has to physically change the length
of the air column in his throat, which forces the higher pitch of the two reeds downward.
Meanwhile, the opposing reed, which normally would only begin vibrating due to a blow air
stream, starts vibrating in the draw air stream. It’s the interaction of these two pitches that creates
a bent note. “When I explained all this to the people at Hohner,” Baker says, “they regarded it as
a malfunction because notes in-between the 12-tone scale aren’t common in European classical
or folk music.”

That explanation occurred some time after 1987, when Baker began consulting to Hohner. By
then, Baker had learned what turned the company’s best-selling instrument into a piece of junk.
For one thing, the milling tools used to cut those all-important reeds and reed slots were not
being sharpened or replaced, causing sloppy work. In addition, the company’s protocols for
tuning, which required all Hohner harmonicas, including Marine Bands, to be tuned three times,
with rest periods in-between so the material could settle, were scrapped. “They cut out all of that
because it was an easy way to make more money,” says Baker.

By this time, Lee Oskar had become so fed up with the quality of Marine Bands that he started
his own harmonica company. “I had never thought of going into business to manufacture
harmonicas,” Oskar says, “but I needed tools that could live up to my expectations.”

A few of Pollard’s “Mag7s.” These are Hohner harmonicas that Pollard customizes, by cutting
them down to a smaller size. This allows him to cup his hands around the harp, which creates a
distinctive sound when a musician is at a microphone.

SONIC TRAILBLAZING

Happily for Oskar, a gentleman named Yasuharo Mano, who is the owner of a venerable
Japanese musical-instrument manufacturer called Tombo, was a fan of Oskar’s music when he
was with WAR. In 1983, Oskar and Tombo formed a partnership, and Lee Oskar Harmonicas
was born.

One of the first things Oskar set out to fix was the way a harmonica is assembled. Marine Bands
had long been held together with nails. A player could therefore open the instrument and try
tuning the reeds, but when he went to put it back together again, there’d always be a small
amount of air leakage. Oskar filled these gaps with beeswax so that the “repaired” instrument
could play. “It was a pain in the butt, let’s put it that way,” he says. The solution seemed
obvious: put harmonicas together with screws.

Joe Filisko and Eric Noden playing.

Oskar then worked with Tombo on the reeds. Like those in Marine Bands, the reeds in a Lee
Oskar Harmonica are made of brass, which is not to say they are the same. Tombo uses more
copper in its brass than just about any manufacturer, and that makes the reed more resilient. For
Oskar, this translates to great response and great sound. “I play a harmonica very, very hard, but
I play with finesse,” he says. “That’s what I was after.”

Although the problems with the Marine Band began in the 1970s, the instrument didn’t hit its
low point until the 1980s. By then, Hohner’s marquee model was not only facing its first serious
competition from Lee Oskar, the company as a whole was going broke. “Hohner should have
gone bankrupt in the late 1980s,” Baker says, but around 1986, the Deutsche Bank bailed the
company out, kicking out the Hohner family and appointing new management. The new regime
could have turned to the many, excellent craftsmen in the factory for help and advice, but instead
they hired a consulting firm. “They said, ‘What you need to do is automate. Then you can get rid
of the workforce,’” recalls Baker. “It was very cynical.”
Meanwhile, more and more harp players were trying to figure out how to fix their unresponsive
Marine Bands. “Many a professional harmonica player came banging on my door,” says Joe
Filisko, recalling the 1990s at his shop in Joliet, Ill. Over the years, Filisko had gained a
reputation for his harmonica customization work—many called him “the genius of Joliet”—and
unlike your average tinkerer, Filisko had his own machine shop. “They were pleading for help,”
he says. With the assistance of another player and customizer named Richard Sleigh, Filisko not
only made harmonicas start sounding better, he also figured out how to tune instruments to suit a
player’s style—a combination that became known as “the Filisko Method.

Like most harmonica customizers, Richard Sleigh also plays.

Watch blues Legend Charlie Musselwhite and Richard Bargel performing "Mississippi Beat Part I" at Altes
Pfandhaus, Cologne, Germany.

For Filisko and Sleigh, no detail about the harmonica was too small. According to Sleigh, Filisko
was the one who created the tools and techniques to reshape the cover plates, to make them look
more like prewar Marine Bands and “give the draw reeds more room to swing at the low end of
the harmonica,” (on low-key Marine Bands, the long reeds would actually hit the inside of the
cover plate). Their work, Sleigh says, “was based on everything Joe and I learned from whoever
would talk to us. There were no books; it was all unknown territory.”

“STRETCH HARPS,” “LUCKY 13s,” and “MAG7s”

To solve the technical problem posed by the Marine Bands, Filisko and Sleigh tightened the
tolerances of the reed slots using a technique called “embossing,” which was developed by a
harmonica player and customizer named Rick Epping. By 1990, Epping was consulting to
Hohner’s U.S. branch, and he devised embossing, also referred to as “sizing” or “burnishing,” as
a manual way to fix the sloppy work that was coming off the Hohner production line. The
technique essentially involved forcing the edges of the reed and the reed slot together, by hand,
with a specially designed tool. With countless poorly constructed Marine Bands floating around,
Filisko and Sleigh were kept busy for years.

As Baker got to know Hohner better, he realized the company was out of touch with the kind of
music he loved. For them, harmonica music was trios and classical music, with harmonica
arrangements written for the violin parts. “They thought the stuff people like me played—blues
and rock ’n’ roll—was horrible. At the time, they didn’t understand it, so they had no respect for
it.”.

Meanwhile, Brendan Power, a New Zealand-based customizer known for his extreme harmonica
hacking and alternate tunings, was getting even more experimental. Power took the notion of
harmonica customizing literally, adding extra holes to off-the-shelf Marine Bands. “I’d take a
hacksaw, chop them up, and glue them back together in different sizes,” Power told me. Power is
probably best known for his 13-hole harps, his “lucky 13s.” These are basically 10-hole harps
with an extra octave glued on the bottom, giving them an additional low range. “I call them
stretch harps,” Power says.

California harmonica customizer, tuner, and technician Kinya Pollard went in the other direction.
Because he has small hands, he reduced the size of off-the-shelf Hohners from 10 holes to seven.
“I found I wasn’t really using the top three holes on a regular harmonica, so I chopped them off,”
he told me. With harmonicas, size matters, especially if you are playing with electric
amplification. In those situations, players cup their hands around the instrument, in order to
create an airtight chamber that overdrives the microphone. (The technique was pioneered by
Little Walter, who amplified his harmonica to the point of distortion by cupping his hands
around the bullet-shaped body of a taxi dispatcher’s microphone.) When Pollard tried this trick,
however, the harmonica got in its own way. “Now when I play amplified, I can close my hands
completely and get a very fat sound.” Power may have had his “lucky 13” but Pollard had his
“Mag7”—short for Magnificent.

The ChromaBender: all-new hybrid Chromatic-Diatonic Harmonica.

As a harp tech and teacher, Kinya Pollard spends a lot of his bench time tuning harmonicas,
which is surprisingly difficult for an instrument with so few moving parts. The first step in this
process is to make sure the reed is positioned properly. To accomplish this, Pollard places the
reed plate in a light box to produce a halo around the reed’s edges. When all he can see is a
symmetrical sliver of light surrounding the reed, he knows he’s got good compression. And that
means the player won’t have to blow hard to play expressively and with nuance.

“Tuning’s a very deep subject,” says Brendan Power. Jazz players and those who like to play
melodies with a lot of individual notes prefer what’s called “tempered tuning.” Blues and folk
players, who often play chords or combinations of notes, prefer something called “just
intonation,” in which some of the reeds are deliberately tuned flatter or sharper in relation to
others in order to achieve a nice, sweet-sounding chord. One is not better than the other, says
Power. “If it sounds good to you, then that’s the right tuning.”

Perhaps more than anyone else, Steve Baker helped Hohner regain its former harmonica glory.

When Lee Oskar started his own harmonica company, he designed them to be taken apart so
players can experiment with different tunings by swapping out the reed plates, which come in
dozens of keys.

VICTORY

The growing interest on the part of the world’s best harmonica players for the work of people
like Sleigh, Filisko, Power, and Pollard did not go unnoticed in Trossingen, in no small part
because Baker was forcing Hohner to pay attention—particularly to Sleigh and Filisko. When
they started customizing Marine Bands on a commercial scale, Hohner was initially very
opposed to it, Baker recalls. “They said, ‘These guys are our competitors,’ whereas, actually,
what they were doing was raising the quality of Hohner’s instruments back to where it ought to
have been.”

While Baker was encouraging Hohner to watch what was happening beyond its factory walls,
Rick Epping was trying to change the company from the inside. Before either had a chance to
make their cases, however, the consultants had convinced Hohner to automate, which resulted in
the installation of a robot production line during 1991 and 1992. “Once again,” says Baker, “they
completely underestimated the complexity of the instrument. They succeeded in setting up a
system that made harmonicas, but it didn’t work very well.” Things got so bad inside the factory
that at one point Hohner thought it would be simpler to just pull the plug on the Marine Band
altogether, but protests from players and the efforts of people like Epping and Baker prevented
that.

“Hohner should have gone bankrupt in the late 1980s,” Baker says, but around 1986, the
Deutsche Bank bailed the company out, kicking out the Hohner family and appointing new
management. The new regime could have turned to the craftsmen in the factory for help and
advice, but instead they hired a consulting firm. “They said, ‘What you need to do is automate.
Then you can get rid of the workforce,’” recalls Baker. “It was very cynical.”

Fortunately, says Baker, Hohner never completely discontinued its traditional production
process—today, Hohner Marine Bands are still assembled by hand. By 2004, after a decade and
a half of inside advocacy, Rick Epping finally persuaded Hohner to invest money in retooling, so
the reed slots could be cut as accurately as possible.

For his part, Baker’s role in the rescue of the Marine Band was to implement the best practices of
customizers like Filisko and Sleigh. Baker made it his particular mission to get Hohner to seal
the instrument’s comb, or to use materials that would not swell, shrink, and crack. Until Baker
showed up, Marine Band combs, which were made of pear wood, were not even sealed. “That’s
why the wooden combs used to swell up, stick out, and cut your lips,” Baker says.

These and other improvements resulted in the Marine Band Deluxe, which Baker believes may
be the best harmonica Hohner has ever made. But Baker was still nibbling at the edges—he
wanted Hohner to get in bed with Filisko, to make him a part of Hohner. Finally, in 2007, a
manager named Klaus Stetter arrived in Trossingen and read a 10-page report Baker had written
suggesting the Filisko alliance. “I said, ‘Look, it’s essential we start working with this Filisko
dude,’” recalls Baker. Apparently, Epping was opposed to this approach fearing people would
say Hohner was simply imitating Filisko. Baker didn’t see why that would be so bad, and he
cites the “Hohner Affiliated Customizers,” or HAC, which is a small, select group of harmonica
customizers who are accredited by Filisko and only work with Hohner parts to produce high-
quality custom instruments, as proof that working with Filsko was a good idea.

Today, harmonica players can choose from any number of top-of-the-line Marine Bands that
have Filisko, Sleigh, and Baker’s fingerprints all over them, including the now-classic Marine
Band Deluxe (around $55), the Marine Band Crossover, which has a bamboo comb (around
$60), and the top-of-the-line, Joe Filisko-signed Thunderbird, which is a Crossover Marine Band
with low tunings (around $125). “I think they’re just putting it out there to see what happens,”
says Filisko.

A MUSICAL DEMOCRATIZER

Hohner’s relatively new invention: the Thunderbird, designed by Joe Filisko, basically a tricked-
out, low-key Marine Band.

From all indications, these innovations are inspiring still more innovation. The Thunderbird’s
contribution to the Marine Band’s evolution is its thicker reeds. Meanwhile, Brendan Power is
producing harmonicas with extra reeds, which come to life when a player bends low notes.
Customizers and instrument manufacturers alike are also creating new kinds of combs, which
Pollard calls a “cottage industry.” For his part, Pollard uses combs made out of Corian, a popular
material for kitchen counters, but other harp techs prefer aviation-grade aluminum and even
brass. “There’s clearly a weight difference,” Pollard says, “and it’s a little too heavy for me—I
slammed it into my teeth a couple of times. I’m just not used to it.”

At the other end of the weight spectrum is plastic, which has captured the interest of many star
performers, including Mickey Raphael. Respected as one of the harmonica world’s greats,
Raphael has shared the stage with Willie Nelson for some 40-plus years. He is considered a
master of the Hohner Echo Harp, which gives so many Willie Nelson tunes their sweet, sad
sound, but there are times when a Marine Band that’s been customized by Filisko and Power is
just the harp he wants. “I play hard, two hours a night, five nights a week,” he says. “I’m kind of
abusive.”

One of Brendan Power’s trademarks is to stretch ordinary Marine Band harmonicas. The one at
the bottom is a regular Marine Band, while the two above it have been stretched to 12 and 14
holes respectively. Note how the numbers on the cover in the middle harp do not match the
number of holes.

During a recent conversation, Raphael explained that an older harmonica with a wooden comb is
the perfect harp when he’s safe and snug in a climate-controlled recording studio, but the air in
some of the places he plays with Willie Nelson can get pretty thick. “In the studio,” he says, “I
can baby it. On the road, I want a harmonica I can hammer nails with.”

Here's Kinya Pollard, "the Harpsmith," demonstrating how to tune the reeds of a diatonic harmonica.

Today, Hohner is known, and once again respected, for both kinds of harmonicas. “The Marine
Bands they’re making now,” says Sleigh, “are on the level of anything they did in the past. In
many cases, they’re better.” Baker agrees. “I hardly need to adjust the instruments any more,” he
says. “I just play them out of the box now. So does Joe.”

In the end, that’s all Lee Oskar was after back in the 1970s, when he was buying up the
harmonica inventories of the world’s music stores. Despite all those years becoming a harmonica
connoisseur, Oskar loves harmonicas for their democratic qualities. “The harmonica was
originally designed for the musically hopeless,” Oskar told me. “It’s one of the few instruments
that you can just breathe in and out of and sound like you’re making music. I failed music in
school, in Denmark, as a kid,” he adds. “But when I was 6 years old and put a harmonica in my
mouth, it sounded like a symphony.”