From the Sheng to the Blues: The Story of the Harmonica
In December 1965, two astronauts orbiting the Earth aboard Gemini 6 radioed Mission Control to report an unidentified object in a polar orbit, apparently piloted by a man in a red suit. Then came the punchline: Wally Schirra pulled out a tiny harmonica he had smuggled aboard and played "Jingle Bells", while Tom Stafford jingled a set of small bells. It is often described as the first music played in space.
It is fitting that a harmonica got there first. No other instrument is so small, so cheap and so easy to carry, and few have travelled so far. Its story stretches from ancient China to the workshops of nineteenth-century Germany, and from there to porches, juke joints and recording studios across America.
An Ancient Idea: The Free Reed
The harmonica's sound comes from a free reed: a thin tongue of material that vibrates back and forth through a closely fitting slot. The idea is very old. In China, the sheng, a mouth organ made of bamboo pipes set in a wind chamber, each pipe sounded by a small metal reed, has been played for thousands of years. It is mentioned in some of the oldest Chinese poetry, and versions of it are still played today. Related instruments spread across East and Southeast Asia.
How the free reed reached Europe is not perfectly documented. Examples of the sheng are known to have reached Europe in the eighteenth century, and many historians believe they inspired European experiments with free reeds, though the exact paths of influence are still discussed. What is clear is that by the late eighteenth century European builders were fitting free reeds into organs and new experimental instruments.
Europe's Mouth Organ Craze
The early nineteenth century was full of inventors trying to make free reeds practical. In the 1820s, small mouth-blown instruments with rows of reeds began to appear in Germany and Austria. The Berlin instrument maker Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann is often credited with an early mouth harmonica in the early 1820s, but historians debate who deserves the title of inventor, and several makers seem to have been working on similar ideas at the same time.
A crucial step was the layout of the notes. Tradition credits a Bohemian maker named Joseph Richter, around the 1820s, with the arrangement in which each hole has a blow reed and a draw reed, laid out so that a player can produce a full major chord simply by blowing and another by drawing. The details of Richter's life are uncertain, but the system bearing his name, Richter tuning, became the standard for the ten-hole diatonic harmonica and remains so today.
By the middle of the century, harmonicas were being made in workshops around Vienna and in the towns of Saxony and Württemberg. They were cheap, cheerful and popular, but still largely a cottage industry.
Matthias Hohner and the Factory Harmonica
That changed in the small town of Trossingen, in southern Germany. In 1857, a clockmaker named Matthias Hohner began making harmonicas, at first by hand with his family. Hohner had a gift for organisation and selling. He adopted production methods that allowed his workshop to turn out instruments in large numbers and at consistent quality, and he looked beyond Germany for customers.
His most important market proved to be the United States. Hohner harmonicas crossed the Atlantic in huge quantities in the later nineteenth century, sold through general stores and mail-order catalogues for very little money. In 1896 the company introduced the Marine Band model, which became one of the most famous harmonicas ever made and is still in production. Trossingen grew into a harmonica capital, and Hohner into one of the world's largest makers of musical instruments.
The Harmonica Finds the Blues
In America, the harmonica fell into the hands of people who could afford few other instruments, and they did something its German designers never planned. Players in the rural South discovered that by playing a harmonica in a different key from the one it was built in, now called cross harp or second position, and by bending notes with the shape of the mouth and throat, the little instrument could moan, wail and imitate trains, animals and the human voice.
Early recordings in the 1920s captured this sound. DeFord Bailey, famous for his train imitations, became one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry radio show. Sonny Terry brought a whooping, rhythmic style to the Piedmont blues, and John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson helped make the harmonica a lead instrument in blues bands of the 1930s and 1940s.
The most dramatic leap came in postwar Chicago. Little Walter cupped his harmonica around a microphone and played it through an amplifier, turning it into a fat, distorted, saxophone-like voice. His 1952 instrumental "Juke" became a major hit, and players such as Big Walter Horton, Junior Wells and James Cotton made the amplified "Chicago harp" a defining sound of electric blues, and later of rock.
Folk, Pop and the Chromatic Harmonica
The harmonica also became the companion of the travelling folk singer. Woody Guthrie played one, and in the 1960s Bob Dylan wore his in a neck rack so he could play it while strumming guitar, an image copied by countless songwriters. Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen kept that tradition going.
Hohner also developed the chromatic harmonica, with a button-operated slide that gives access to all twelve notes. Larry Adler showed that it could play concert music, and Toots Thielemans brought it into jazz with remarkable lyricism. Stevie Wonder made it one of the most joyful sounds in soul and pop.
The Harmonica Today
More than a century and a half after Hohner's first workshop, the harmonica is still played in blues clubs, on country records, by folk singers and in classrooms. It remains one of the cheapest real instruments a beginner can buy, and one of the hardest to master completely.
You can also try one with no instrument at all: HarmonyHub lets you play a virtual harmonica free in your browser, with standard, blues, chromatic and tremolo models, including a blues harp with pitch bend. If you enjoy it, the other wind instruments are worth a look too.
Small Instrument, Long Journey
The harmonica began as an ancient idea from China, was refined by European tinkerers, mass produced in a German town and then reinvented by blues players who bent its notes into something new. Few instruments have done so much from inside a pocket.