By Crispin Sartwell

I started playing the harmonica when I was fourteen. My brother Bob showed me the basic riff from "You Got to Move" by the Rolling Stones. It's a good blues lick, adaptable to a lot of songs. Bobby actually moved the harp on my lips to show me, and we both laughed the first time I got it right. For months that was the only thing I could play. [pic 5: 1]

The basic structure of the blues is almost always the same and the repertoire of riffs fairly limited. Indeed, part of the richness of the blues derives from its narrowness: any slight deviation takes on great significance within a system that is so restricted, in which the expectations of the listener are so determined: the arc of the song becomes evident from the first few moves. The expressive intensity of the blues derives from its roughness and simplicity. When you no longer have to focus on what the next change will be, you focus on how to express yourself within it, how to exploit it emotionally. Spontaneity follows on and reflects discipline.

I'd like to say that the first time I heard the blues I was walking down Beale Street or hanging out on the south side of Chicago. But actually I was in Nepal. My cousin Lizzie put on "The London Muddy Waters Sessions." My scalp prickled. I heard Muddy Waters and knew that was what music should sound like. or at any rate I knew that was what my music should sound like. The most impure possible context for the blues: in a country where there were no black or white people, really: thousands of miles from the American south. Maybe I needed to hear the music out of context, somewhere where it didn't sound normal, where the music in the bazaar sounded jangly and incomprehensible. I still own a copy of that disk. The damage on its surface-its crackles and skips-traces my intense relation to it, and give it a kind of oldtime-sounding authenticity. But even with all that displacement - in Kathmandu listening to British guys play southern American black music on a recording - the blues seemed to me like an absolutely inevitable syntax, as though I was hearing my own voice the way I wanted it to be.

The first time I put a harp in my mouth, a couple of months after I returned from Nepal, it was a piece of wood and metal I stuck between my lips; my mouth didn't know how to make its shape. I didn't know how to find the holes in the harp with the breath stream from my lungs to the external air and from the air back into my body. The harp had numbers on each hole, and I would remove the harp from my mouth to see what holes I was blowing. Not able to force the harp to make any sense, I had the idea, common when you pick up a new instrument, that it would always seem alien to me.

In learning to play the harp, body and instrument emerge into a system. The harp is a particularly excellent instrument for that: for one thing it's tiny: you can carry one wherever you go. You can play it while you walk down the street; you can cup it in your hand; it is about the same size as your mouth. Its timbre is very much the timbre of the human voice and the sounds you produce with it come to feel like a voice. Notes can be "bent," so that you are not, as on a keyboard, limited to the tones that the instrument is designed to emit. You can gradually pull a note up or down in a continuous tonal circuit. The tones are made by freely vibrating reeds in a column of breath: truly the most flexible and intimate musical system of body and body: you're doing exactly one thing at a time: simply working the object with your mouth.

A traditional Marine Band harp has a wooden mouthpiece that is tongued as you play. This is divided into ten holes which open into the reed plate and through which the air must pass. The lips rest and move on metal wafers that are nailed to the reedplate. Within the reedplate, the reeds - just tiny rectangles of metal - vibrate. Some are set to vibrate when air is blown over them, some when air is sucked back through them, so that blowing and sucking produce different tones. Each hole is large and separate enough from the others to be sounded individually. But the holes are close enough together that one can find chords by playing two or more simultaneously. You can also place the tongue on one or two holes and play the surrounding holes on one or both sides, and get a peculiarly satisfying and bluesy effect by slapping your tongue on the holes, suddenly stopping the flow of air to some of them but not to others. By shaking your head very quickly back and forth, or shaking the harp, you can get a kind of high-speed trill. When you really connect to the reeds you can make them wail, sing, squawk, speak.

Soon I was playing all the time. At first not because I loved the noise I was making; the noise was not so good. But I wanted something in my mouth; the harp was my teenager's pacifier. You blow and suck on a harp; you never need to stop. The music and the breath are the same thing: you coat the harp with spit and it bathes you in sound. I would walk to and from school blowing almost randomly. When I got home I would put on a blues record - Sonny Boy Williamson or Little Walter or Muddy Waters again - and listen to what was happening through the harp. Slowly my playing acquired form. Soon I could play some of the songs I heard note for note. Eventually I was playing without thinking about how to play or what I would play next or even how it sounded.

I do not try to play songs anymore, and I don't play the same way twice with the same song; it is all improvisation. The freedom of improvisation is made available by the directness and simplicity of blues syntax. I am improvising out of a very limited range of licks I learned from the masters and a few I devised myself. Within this utter constriction I am perfectly free; I am not trying to play correctly or to play a song the way it should be played; I am simply releasing my body into the song and living there, at least on a good day. The blues itself is a tolerant form; mistakes often sound intentional; or even if they don't they sound "bluesy," they give a sense of unrehearsed, unpolished expressiveness. There's a Rolling Stones song called "Down Home Girl." At the end, Mick Jagger plays a couple of riffs on the harp. They're much rougher than anything even Keith Richards would acknowledge as professional guitar playing, but they serve to locate the song in the rough and rural American south, a necessary shift of geography by boys from London playing the blues and singing in simulated drawls. Indeed the impression of naivete and spontaneity, and the impression of countryside, are often conveyed by the harmonica. I think it is fair to say, for example, that Bob Dylan intentionally never learned to play the harmonica, or learned to simulate incompetence. A truly slick display of technical proficiency on the harmonica, though of course admirable, is almost annoying; it contradicts the simplicity and amateur status of the instrument, which lies on the spectrum somewhere between the saxophone and the kazoo.