Nashville gig TOMORROW

I realize that very few of you live within easy driving distance of Nashville, but if you do: Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors are playing there tomorrow evening, October 3rd, at a terrific venue, Acme Feed and Seed.

We'll not only be kicking and stomping and partying with you, but we'll be hanging out with our new agent and Nashville denizen, Alan Ladd of Soul South Entertainment. Ladd's boutique booking agency represents singer Carla Cooke, the late Sam Cooke's youngest daughter--a wonderful talent in her own right, and somebody I got to jam with on "Little Red Rooster" at a recent festival in the Mississippi Delta. (I'm blowing harp through a HarpGear 2. Video sound here is a bit crispy, but you'll get the idea.)

With Alan and Soul South in our corner, we're feeling great about our longterm prospects. Here's a video from our Sterling Magee celebration in Gulfport, Fla. back in May, just to remind you how our live show is shaping up.

Harmonica UK Virtual Festival

On Friday, October 15, I'll be helping kick off one of the UK's premier harmonica events with a 75 minute Zoom-style workshop on the art of comping. It's an honor to be part of this event, one featuring Howard Levy (yes!), Will Wilde (badass!), and a host of international players.

Best of all, the event is FREE! It's donation-driven--and harmonica folk are generous folk, as we know.

Here's the link. Please register today!

HARMONICA UK VIRTUAL FESTIVAL

Videos

My most recent upload to YouTube, shared below, is the strangest video I have ever uploaded. That is not an exaggeration.

And no, for those who have suggested this: I wasn't high or drunk when I made it. I was sober, caffeinated, and fully present at 10:30 on a late summer morning, two days before the full moon.

It is also my best-performing video by far, out of the box, in terms of views. And with an 80/20 likes-to-dislikes ratio, it has quickly incurred far more antipathy, percentage-wise, than anything else I've done since first signing on to YouTube back in 2007.

What can possibly account for this response? I'd like to think it's because I did something genuinely new--something that makes all other blues harmonica teaching videos on YouTube, including my own, suddenly feel old fashioned, tame, safe.

That was my intent. Without quite intending to, I was also trying to satirize the whole YT blues-harp-guy teaching thing: so many earnest, bright-eyed, thoughtful, self-assured, here's-how-to-do-it, step-by-step videos! Tab sheets, end cards, bumper music, "please subscribe." The whole mess. This is what we are. This is what we've turned blues harmonica pedagogy into.

Meanwhile, the world outside our screens is falling apart. Species are dying on a weekly basis. American democracy is buckling and breaking. The pandemic has killed more than 700,000 Americans and 4.5 million people worldwide. Global warming, now undeniable, is transforming our weather, our ecosystems, in non-trivial ways that should inspire panic.

So I decided to take a wrecking ball and swing it. For once in my life, I went full-bore weird. Surely ours is a cultural moment when a little radical experimentation might be allowed?

Intriguingly, some useful teaching showed up when I did that--some stumbled-upon insights about what blues is and how it works that kinder, gentler teaching videos can't begin to convey.

Was this video an act of madness? Or a brilliant gambit? Or an annoying and regrettable distraction from what I should really be doing, which is smiling at the camera and acting like your friendly neighborhood harp-guy sock puppy?

Have I destroyed my brand, or renewed it?

I wasn't entertaining any of those thoughts as I turned my camera on. I was just brimming with a desire to make a radically different kind of blues harmonica teaching video.

It's called "Very Modern Blues Harmonica Lesson."

Other, ah...videos

Now that THAT bit of madness is out of the way, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Here are four recent videos, several of which I've highlighted in other newsletters:

1) Bobby Rush LIVE in Ruleville, Mississippi

2) the art of comping – Shake, Rattle & Roll

3) best warmup routine for beginning harmonica players

4) Willie Brown's Crossroads harmonica riff

A word of advice from the good doctor: Don't be afraid to let the cat out of the bag from time to time. Muddy Waters put it best: "If I don't go crazy...I will surely lose my mind."

Amen, Muddy.

--Adam G. in Oxford Missippi