Bill Tarsha and the Rocket 88s led the 18th annual blues harmonica blowout last week at the Rhythm Room. More than 35 blues harmonica players performed. Tarsha and his band opened with a couple tunes.

As long as harmonica player, guitarist and singer-songwriter Tony Holiday has been making music, it's always come out bluesy, without premeditation. “That's just the way I play,” he says ...

Fifty cents and a cereal box top. That, and whatever a stamp cost in 1949, sparked one of the most remarkable instrumental careers in music history, one that landed Charlie McCoy in the Country Music ...

Brody Buster performs as a one-man band before a Royals game at Kauffman Stadium in June. It's been twenty years since Brody Buster's first round of glory days — when he was a 10-year-old blues ...

Every once in a while, the mail brings a CD that sparks a small revelation. A few months back, a two-disc anthology arrived called “Blues Harp Women,” and until that moment I didn’t realize that my ...

Blues harmonica virtuoso and onetime Muddy Waters sideman James Cotton died on Thursday at a medical center in Austin of pneumonia. He was 81. A rep for the musician confirmed his death. Cotton, who ...

At a young age, the soul of the blues grabbed Eric VonHerzen by the collar and shoved itself into his pocket. In Orange County during the early ‘70s, there probably weren’t too many kids who needed it ...

Every instrument has an image. The piano is largely synonymous with bourgeois respectability and the electric guitar with youthful rebellion. Perhaps more importantly, both of these devices has a ...

John “Juke” Logan, 66, a Los Angeles-based blues harmonica player whose wailing melodies can be picked out of the theme music for the 1990s TV sitcoms “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement,” died Aug. 30 ...

Tony Glover, a harmonica player who as a member of the group Koerner, Ray and Glover was at the center of the folk music revival of the 1960s and helped introduce a new audience to the blues, died on ...