Harmonica


Harmonica Alan's Harmonica
Harmonica Alan's harmonica
Modern Blues Harmonica Click on the harmonica to listen to the Dirty-South Blues House Forum discuss Alan
Part 1 of a way too short overview of the great Alan Wilson's harmonica playing on the song: Boogie Chillun' #2 from the Hooker n' Heat album
Part 2 of a way too short overview of the great Alan Wilson's harmonica playing on the song: Boogie Chillun' #2 from the Hooker n' Heat album

How did Alan Wilson play the solo on "On The Road Again"?(click here)

In the middle of an typically lyrical solo on Canned Heat's "On The Road Again", Al Wilson hits a G in the midrange of his A harmonica. - Pat Missin
Harp L

Harp-L Archives:

(click title below)
Pat Missin on Alan Wilson-flat 3rd
Pulling Hair Blues
"On the Road Again" Commercial
Alan Wilson / Hooker 'n' Heat

Alan's Harmonica Playlist:

  • Boogie Chillen No. 2
  • Bring It On Home
  • Do Not Enter
  • Fear And Loathing At 4th And Butternut
  • Help Me
  • I Want To Come Home On The Morning Train
  • I’d Rather Be The Devil
  • Levee Camp Moan
  • Nine Below Zero
  • An Owl Song
  • On The Road Again
  • Parthenogenesis
  • Pulling Hair Blues
  • Rich Woman
  • Skat
  • Sugar Bee
  • Sweet Cocaine
  • Walking By Myself
  • You Talk To Much
  • Raga Kafi
  • Five Owls
  • Drifter
  • Let’s Make It

Excerpt from “Boogie Man The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century”

by Charles Shaar Murray

“ ‘We’re gonna bring Alan out now, John,’ announces a voice from the control room. ‘You wanna take a little breather?’ But it’s straight into ‘Drifter,’ a distant scion of the extended slow-blues song family Hooker derived from Charles Brown’s “Driftin’ Blues” with The Blind Owl’s reverb-soaked amplified harmonica illuminating Hooker’s desolate blues-scape like neon lights through dockside fog.

If Wilson’s entry seems tentative, it’s because he’s listening: not just with his ears, but seemingly with his entire nervous system. His acute sensitivity and empathy with Hooker’s celebrated idiosyncrasies are nothing short of astounding: it’s as if he’s extending temporal antennae into the immediate future to predict exactly where Hooker is about to go.

Seemingly, he was capable of anticipating not only whether or not Hooker is about to leave a space, but whether that space is one which should be left empty or filled by a harp intervention.

Furthermore, Wilson’s harp sound is utterly extraordinary: talky and squawky but never thin or flimsy; huge and rich but never flabby or cloying. Every timbral and stylistic resource in the blues-harp tradition seems to be literally at the tip of his tongue, to be alluded to or utilized at will, and yet he seems free of the need to plagiarize, to ape or mimic the major styles he has evidently studied so assiduously.

Whether delicately simmering like a muted Hammond organ or brassily blasting like a trombone from hell, he is utterly his own man.”