Today, October 24, is Sonny Terry’s birthday. He was the harmonica player who could make the harp sound like a train, a pack of hunting dogs and a field holler all at once. He was born Saunders Terrell in 1911, near Greensboro, Georgia (Alan Lomax’s archive gives 1912, and some sources follow that year).
A Boy Who Learned From His Father
According to the National Endowment for the Arts biography, it was his father who taught him his first blues, along with the train and hound imitations. Two accidents, one at 11 and another at 16, took the sight from both eyes. With farm work out of reach, music became his trade. Britannica also points to the influence of DeFord Bailey, the Grand Ole Opry harmonica man, which makes perfect sense once you hear both of their locomotives.
In the early 1930s, in Durham, North Carolina, he played the streets with Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis, and he backed Fuller on records made between 1937 and 1940.
Carnegie Hall by Accident
The 1938 story is one of the best in the blues. John Hammond went to Durham to book Fuller for the From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. Fuller was in jail, so Hammond booked Terry instead, as the Association for Cultural Equity archive tells it. On Christmas Eve that year, Alan Lomax recorded Terry for the Library of Congress.
Fuller died in 1941, and that is when the partnership with guitarist Brownie McGhee began. It lasted around forty years, through splits and reunions. They even made it to Broadway: Terry was in Finian’s Rainbow in 1947, and the duo joined Elia Kazan’s 1955 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In the 1960s, Terry played folk and blues festivals around the world.
What I Hear in His Playing
The NEA describes Terry’s technique as playing the harmonica in a key other than the one it is tuned to. For those of us who play, that is good old second position, cross harp. He controlled his breath, cupped his hands around the harp and bent the notes, and in the middle of it all he let his voice out, those short whoops between phrases. Harp and voice become one instrument.
If you are just starting out, listen to “Locomotive Blues” and “Lost John” from Harmonica and Vocal Solos, which is in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog. The train there is not a decoration; it is the groove of the whole tune. Try playing along with just the breathing rhythm, drawing and blowing in time, before you even think about notes. It is the best timing exercise I know.
Here is “Lost John”, in the video Smithsonian Folkways itself posted on YouTube:
In 1975 he published the book The Harp Styles of Sonny Terry. He received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1982, together with McGhee, was heard on the soundtrack of The Color Purple in 1985, and died on March 11, 1986, in Mineola, New York. He is also in the Blues Hall of Fame.
Whenever someone asks me how to make the harmonica “talk”, I tell them to listen to Sonny Terry. Happy birthday, Sonny, and thanks for all the locomotives.
— Ale Ravanello