Harmonica Quotes

Besides my great fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.

I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.

You don't speak much, do you?" ter Borcht said, circling him slowly. Fittingly, Fang said nothing. Vhy do you let a girl be de leader?" ter Borcht asked, a calculating look in his eye. She's the tough one," Fang said. Dang right, I thought proudly. Is dere anysing special about you?" asked ter Borcht. "Anysing vorth saving?" Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. "Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.

Vhat ozzer abilities do you haf?" ter Borcht snapped, which his assistant waited, pen in hand. Gazzy thought. "I have X-ray vision," he said. He peered at ter Borcht's chest, then blinked and looked alarmed. Ter Borcht was startled for a second, but then he frowned. "Don't write dat down," he told his assistant in irritation. The assistant froze in midsentence. "You. Do you haf any qualities dat distinguish you in any way?" Nudge chewed on a fingernail. "You mean, like, besides the WINGS?" She shook her shoulders gently, and her beautiful fawn-colored wings unfolded a bit. His face flushed, and I felt like cheering. "Yes," he said stiffly. "Besides de vings." "Hmm. Besides de vings." Nudge tapped one finger against her chin. "Um..." Her face brightened. "I once ate nine Snickers bars in one sitting. Without barfing. That was a record!" "Hardly a special talent," ter Borcht said witheringly. Nudge was offended. "Yeah? Let's see YOU do it." ... "I vill now eat nine Snickers bars," Gazzy said in a perfect, creepy imitation of ter Borcht's voice, "visout bahfing." Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony." Ter Borcht tsked. "You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold on to someone's shirt, yes? Following dem closely?" "Only when I'm trying to steal their dessert" ...Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. "Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica." "I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!" Gazzy barked.

Is dere anysing special about you? Anysing vorth saving?" Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.

My love is like the shape your mouth makes while you whistle. Would you mind if I accompanied you on my harmonica?

Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you...haven't you ever felt that way about music?' Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.' Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.' Red: 'Forget?' Andy: 'Forget that...there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.' Red: 'What're you talking about?' Andy: 'Hope.

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in blurry, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as a starfish loves a coral reef and as a kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fettuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. i will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and as an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of people who talk too much. I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself and as a pair of white gloves loves to slip delicately into the punchbowl. I will love you as the taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock.

The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

Hey, you know something people? I'm not black But there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white

i play a mean harmonica

I have already been loved,” said Edward. “I have been loved by a girl named Abilene. I have been loved by a fisherman and his wife and a hobo and his dog. I have been loved by a boy who played the harmonica and by a girl who died. Don’t talk to me about love,” he said. “I have known love.

I had a dream about you. We were in a band. I was the lead singer, guitar player, saxophonist, harpist, violinist, bassist, cellist, harmonica player, pianist, and drummer. Oh, and I played the trumpet. And you, you had the important role—you played air guitar. I feel this dream accurately reflects me as an unselfish person, willing to stand in the shade so someone else might enjoy the spotlight and get all the glory.

I daydream about a high school where everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the janitor and the cook in the cafeteria.

And then we're at that moment when you both go and get what you want or you both go back. The moment when you say, Stuff being scared; what's on the other side is better. That moment when you inch closer to each other little by little, till your skin starts and ends in the same place. Till your faces get so close your lips start and end in the same place, too. Till you taste milk shake and salt and sugar days and the world spins and the stars sound like harmonicas.

So, you never can tell what will happen when you learn to play the harmonica.

I am the master! I stretch forth my hands, even to the skies! I lay my hands upon the stars, as on the crystal wheels of the harmonica. Now fast, now slow, as my soul wills, I turn the stars. I weave them into rainbows, harmonies. I feel immortality! I create immortality!

A person who spends eight years learning how to make a cake will probably make you a good cake, but a person who spends eight years as an aviator and a tailor and a math tutor and a trainer of bears in the circus will probably kill you in a plane he is flying very badly while wearing a shirt that doesn't fit and fighting off an ill-behaved bear, all the while insisting that seven times six is harmonica.

Dad, will they ever come back?" "No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica. "No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road." "Oh, no," said Will. "Oh, yes, said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun." They moved around the carousel slowly. "What will they look like? How will we know them?" "Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here." Both boys looked around swiftly. But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves. Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad. Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole. Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will. Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders. The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night. Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey. Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy. Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord. Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes. How easy, thought Will. Just this once, thought Jim. But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally... The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment. ...finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks... proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows.... Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.

I got a new golf bag. I keep it full of sad harmonica tunes that I hand out like Halloween candy to all the rainy-eyed players.

I told her I loved the howling sound of her harmonica. That seemed to be the limit of my courage that night, and even those spoken words had to struggle their way out of my mouth. It's all very well for words to build bridges, but sometimes I think it's a matter of knowing when to do it. Knowing when the time's right.

Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.

I got to tell you, that if it weren't for that harmonica music, i might of just packed up and gone home, but it made me feel so good, I can hardly describe it. Sort of like my whole body is the harmonica and the music give me goosebumps when I play it.

Sir, I cannot sing. I have no formal training. I do not read music. And I know this is a church - but I play a mean harmonica.

Unbecoming or not, I dare say that if a harmonica chases away a suitor, he was no suitor at all in the first place.

The harmonica has musical wind, and is the breath of soul. It’s like a sad, lonely I love you lost in the breeze.

And right then I felt my heart soften to Toby, because I knew exactly what he meant. I understood how just about anything in the world could remind you of Finn. Trains, or New York City, or plants, or books, or soft sweet black-and-white cookies, or some guy in Central Park playing a polka on the harmonica and the violin at the same time. Things you'd never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you'd want to show. "Look at that," you'd want to say, because you knew he would find a way to think it was wonderful. To make you feel like the most observant person in the world for spotting it.

It seemed to Kya that when Chase played these melancholy tunes was when he most had a soul.

He clutched the harmonica to his chest and cried into his pillow. He could have sworn he heard music...the Brahms...first as a child's lullaby, then a mournful lament, and finally, a staccato march, accompanied by the ominous sound of jackboots.

the hinder portion scalding-house good eating Curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of "mold" on the "muff" sense of "talk" on the "surface" konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascal that's chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in a blurring, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fetuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of the people who talk too much. I will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock. I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.

Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep.

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.

Now all of a sudden, I was on the streets of Berkeley, in a world of radicals, Hell’s Angels, harmonica queens, drug dealers, and dope kings.

Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, clash of pan, laughter.

So far, everthin’ I’ve used to try to open her’s been about as effective as giving a frog a haircut with a harmonica.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch my father's clarinets or saxophones, just my harmonica.

A harmonica is easy to carry. Take it out of your hip pocket, knock it against your palm to shake out the dirt and pocket fuzz and bits of tobacco. Now it’s ready. You can do anything with a harmonica: thin reedy single tone, or chords or melody with rhythm chords. You can mold the music with curved hands, making it wail and cry like bagpipes, making it full and rounds like an organ, making it as sharp and bitter as the reed pipes of the hills. And you can play it and put it back in your pocket. It is always with you, always in your pocket. And as you play, you learn new tricks, to pinch the tone with your lips, and no one teaches you. You feel around—sometimes in the tent door after supper when the women are washing up. Your foot taps gently on the ground. Your foot taps gently on the ground. Your eyebrows rise and fall in rhythm. And if you lose it or break it, why, it’s no great loss. You can buy another for a quarter.

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

How could he explain to her that it was better this way, that yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk to a photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in your barracks. Ga had seen an old man lose the will to live—you could see it go out of him—when a prison guard made him hand over a locket. No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away.

he took out his harmonica and played the old song “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” a yearning and melodic tune sung by slaves in the 1860s as they rowed boats to the mainland from the Sea Islands of South Carolina.

It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)

No, you mustn’t steal. We agree on that. Except when you steal someone’s heart, because that’s romantic. Or if you steal harmonicas from guys who play the harmonica at parties, because that’s being public spirited.

I once watched a crowd of people wearing nothing but Speedos and Santa hats jog down Boylston in the middle of winter. I met a guy who could play the harmonica with his nose, a drum set with his feet, a guitar with his hands, and a xylophone with his butt all at the same time. I knew a woman who’d adopted a grocery cart and named it Clarence. Then there was the dude who claimed to be from Alpha Centauri and had philosophical conversations with Canada geese.

Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo. (Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.)

She spent the vestigial hours of the night huddled in a large wing-chair, looking too small for it, her little harmonica-sized tran­sistor radio purring away at her elbow. She kept it on the Paterson station, WPAT, which stayed on all night. There were others that did too, but they were crawling with commercials; this one wasn't. It kept murmuring the melodies of Roberta and Can-Can and My Fair Lady, while the night went by and the world, out there beyond its dial, went by with it. She dozed off finally, her head lolling over like a little girl's propped up asleep in a grown-up's chair. ("Too Nice A Day To Die")

Op de volgende statie van deze kruisweg zien wij hoe de eigenaar de kat met geweld door het luikje probeert te duwen. Maar daar zijn katten niet van gediend. Zij laten zich eerst als een harmonica in elkaar duwen, tot ze wel de helft korter zijn dan gewoonlijk, en zetten daarna of al meteen de tegenaanval in. Tenslotte neemt hij met geheven staart de benen en gaat zich op een veilige afstand zitten wassen.

It became more difficult to breathe. I looked around. My body was now included among the objects arranged on the floor. I lay there between the music box and the harmonica, my two legs protruding at odd angles, my hands crossed on my chest, my eyes lowered. In the same way he had wound the spring on the music box or blown into the harmonica, I imagined R would now caress my body in order to call forth memories.

Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past. I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

The daughter wants to turn the past on its back like a turtle or a roach, leaving those legs walking futilely through air cheering on those starved and paralyzed years. The mother put her makeup on, got ready for work, while cigarettes burned down, one by one in the chipped, red ashtray. The daughter stood beside the blaring alarm clock and shook the mother's sleeping body who worked sixteen hours a day and called the daughter and son from pay phones between jobs. When the mother found the daughter on the lawn of the mental hospital playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on her harmonica the mother couldn't believe it, because she was gone the years that led to it. When they finally came together, they came together as guilty mother and guilty daughter and found there was nothing there to trade.

By now the window of the bar is visible, glowing ahead of them, but there is no sound, not a single word to be heard, as if the place were deserted, not a soul … but now, someone is playing the harmonica … Irimias scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to this spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees from one another, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.

And I wanted to be different, so I asked for harmonica lessons.” She tilted her head back, found his eyes in the dark. “Word to the wise, don’t ever learn the harmonica while you have braces.” “Hannah. Oh God. No.” His head fell back briefly, a laugh puffing out of him. “What happened?” “Our parents were in the Mediterranean, so we walked to our neighbor’s house and they were in France—” “Ah, yes. Typical neighborhood problems.” She snorted. “So their landscaper offered to drive me and Piper—who had actually peed her pants laughing—in the back of his truck.” She could barely keep her voice even, the need to giggle was so great. “We were driven to the closest hospital in the back of a pickup truck while the harmonica was stuck to my face. Every time I exhaled, the harmonica would play a few notes. People were honking . . .” His whole body was shaking with laughter, and Hannah could tell he’d finally, fully relaxed. The sexual tension didn’t leave completely, but he’d shelved it for now. “What did they say at the hospital?” “They asked if I was taking requests.

The sea was a fair master. The crew and I were like everyone else. We had our smokes and booze. We had our notebooks and harmonicas. We sang, we gossiped, and we dreamed.

Shall I tell you what rock and roll is, Johnno, from someone who doesn’t perform, but observes?” He gestured with the harmonica, then cupped it again to play softly as he watched her. “It’s restless and rude.” Walking back, she laid a hand on his knee. “It’s daring and defiant. It’s a fist shaken at age. It’s a voice that often screams out questions because the answers are always changing.” She glanced up to see her father standing behind Johnno, listening. Her smile swept over him. “The very young play it because they’re searching for some way to express their anger or joy, their confusion and their dreams. Once in a while, and only once in a while, someone comes along who truly understands, who has the gift to transfer all those needs and emotions into music.

I remember driving there in the afternoon, and I remember getting there and loading the gear in. I don’t remember the sound check. We had one, I think, but we had no idea what to do because we’d never done one before. No one had the foggiest. Not knowing what to do made it exciting, though. Like, now, everybody’s got a stage manager and a sound guy, lights, and so on. The bands know all about sound checks and levels, equipment and all that. Now they even have music schools to teach you that kind of stuff. Back then you knew fuck-all. You didn’t have anyone professional, just your mates, who, like you, were clueless; you had a disco PA and a sleepy barmaid. It’s something I find quite sad about groups today, funnily enough, the careerism of it all. I saw this program once, a “battle of the bands” sort of thing. It had Alex James from Blur on it and Lauren Laverne and some twat from a record company, and they’d sit there saying what they thought of the band: “Your bass player’s shit and your image needs work; lose the harmonica player.” All the bands just stood there and took it, going, “Cheers, man, we’ll go off and do that.” I couldn’t believe it. I joined a band to tell everyone to fuck off, and if somebody said to me, “Your image is shit,” I’d have gone, “Fuck off, knob head!” And if someone had said, “Your music’s shit,” I would have nutted them. That to me is what’s lacking in groups. They’ve missed out that growing-up stage of being bloody-minded and fucking clueless. You have to have ultimate self-belief. You have to believe right from the word go that you’re great and that the rest of the world has to catch up with you. Of us lot, Ian was the best at that. He believed in Joy Division completely. If any of us got downhearted it was always him who would cheer us up and get us going again. He’d put you back on track.

The doll lay crumpled and motionless until he found his harmonica and blew a few soft notes. Gradually, life seemed to enter it. It stirred, rose slowly, and finally began to dance as he played.

It’s a great knife, it’s just that the toothpick is in the center of the knife, so when you use it, it looks like you’re playing some kinda ****ed-up harmonica.

But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. Music filling the brownstone. Black fingers pulling violin bows and strumming cellos, dark lips around horns, a small brown girl with pale pink nails on flute. Malcolm’s younger brother, his dark skin glistening, blowing somberly into a harmonica. A broad‐shouldered woman on harp. From my place on the stairs, I could see through the windows curious white people stopping in front of the building to listen.

No. What was the Keely Motor?" "Something along the lines of what you have here," the colonel said dryly, "except that Keely at least had an explanation for where he was getting his power. Back around 1874, a man named John Keely claimed he had invented a wonderful new power source. He called it a breakthrough in the field of perpetual motion. An undiscovered source of power, he said, controlled by harmony. He had a machine in his lab which would begin to turn a flywheel when he blew a chord on a harmonica. He could stop it by blowing a sour note.

A kiss from him, a shimmy-shake of his body against mine—clothed or not—and I’d need a whole harmonica of cigarettes to come back down to earth.

Old Sam Phillips only had one thing to tell me,” Harmonica Frank says today. “Said it over and over. ‘Gimme something different. Gimme something unique.

In his own way Harmonica Frank was as much a maniac as Little Richard. He sounded like a drunken clown who’s seen it all, remembers about half of that, and makes the rest up. He put together a style of country rock that did not really find an audience until years later, when Bob Dylan caught the same spirit and much of the sound with “Mixed-Up Confusion,” his first single, a lot of the Freewbeelin’ album, and his “I Shall Be Free” songs.

Of all the characters who populate this book, only Harmonica Frank did more than keep the legend of Huckleberry Finn alive—he lived it out. He showed up, made his records, and lit out for the territory, banging his guitar and blowing his harp, dodging Greyhounds and working the fields, setting himself free from an oppression he never bothered to define.

And this revolt is powerful stuff, after all. How long would Ahab have lasted if he’d been up against a howling weirdo like Harmonica Frank instead of a dumb Christian like Starbuck?

in Banjo on My Knee (December 11, 1936). He plays Joel McCrea’s father, a wizened old river denizen and musician who goes off in search of his son, who is himself looking for his estranged wife (Barbara Stanwyck). Brennan dominates scene after scene. He becomes iconic, the very spirit of the fiercely independent and rugged river people. William Faulkner was assigned this picture, and though he was taken off it early, the spirit of the novelist’s country people seems to suffuse Brennan’s performance. He plays a character thirty years older than his actual age—not through makeup or mannerisms, so much as with his reedy voice, semi-toothless grin, and adroitly mussed and thinning hair, all of which projects an age-old and indomitable presence. When Brennan gets to Memphis, just north of Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi, he becomes a hit performer after a club owner discovers him. Brennan’s performance on banjo, harmonica, drums, and various other instruments—while also singing the “Saint Louis Blues”—is pure vaudeville, which is to say, pure Walter Brennan. And it’s worth noting that the scene is also a ruse, since Brennan played no instruments; six musicians actually produced the sound that seems to be coming out of his nimble fingers.

Years down the road, Hammond explained, “What I wanted to do with Bobby was just to get him to sound in the studio as natural, just as he was in person, and have that extraordinary personality come through...After all, he's not a great harmonica player, and he's not a great guitar player, and he's not a great singer. He just happens to be an original. And I just wanted to have that originality come through.

And if they come in force, show them what the Feegles can dae!” Daft Wullie said, “I can play the harmonica.” Rob Anybody sighed. “Aye, weel, I suppose that puts the willies up me, so wud likely keep them awa’.

Benjamin Franklin invented the harmonica.” “It’s

As tae the rest o' ye, tak guard around yon stones. And if they come in force, show them what the Feegles can dae!" Daft Wullie said, "I can play the harmonica.

It made a sound,” Carl says. “Can you describe it?” “Ever put a harmonica in a blender?” “No.” “Then no, I can’t describe it,” he says.

If You Can Breathe, You Can Play Harmonica.

The harmonica is an accordion with soul.

Want wanneer ik mij buk om de druiven die gevallen zijn op te rapen en pijn duwt mijn gezicht weer eens ineen als een harmonica maar ik kijk op en zie de zon weerkaatst in de nieuwe koelkast die van jou en mij samen is, wat betekent pijn dan nog?

could hear a funny sound. It was a faint, but very strange noise, like muffled harmonicas, or a far-off herd of elephants with upset stomachs.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge represents a transition, in the metaphysics of the region, there to be felt even by travelers unwary as Zoyd. When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard a lot of ''Wow,'' and ''Beautiful,'' though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is, because of the bad dream unreleased inside it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea. They rose into the strange gold smothering, visibility down to half a car length. . . . Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.

I tried to ask him what he was actually doing I got a string of programming jargon that was so far beyond me it might as well have been one of those twelve-tone semi-ultrasonic methane-breather languages that shatter ice crystals and sound like a glass harmonica having a bad dia at work.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

Points of Issue Errors or peculiarities in a book that help to differentiate it from other editions. No one else's marginalia inside. An unbroken spine and a pliable binding. No one else's marginalia unless it was penciled into her first pages then thoroughly erased. No ellipses but in the last chapters and then only in soliloquy. No strands of hair in the meadow chapter, nothing ripped out in the two after that. And halfway-a blank page, and a scrawl and dash from the girl. The final story of the back garden and her coiled braids and the dappled grey you kept too long. The harmonica on the dashboard and the girl who taught you your scales. And the book you were always reading, the pulled-off, pockmarked cover, the weight. The night you left it in the trunk bed and in the morning its swollen pages. The girl reading your father's Wordsworth, the scrolling clouds in the meadow, your hands steady on her heaving chest. The final story of the back garden and the coiled girl telling you no. The pages after that.

I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

Alors, ils ont inventé de s’appeler avec des harmonicas qu’ils enfonçaient profond dans la bouche pour pouvoir jouer avec le bout de langue qui leur restait.

L’Albin, avec sa procession de joueurs d’harmonicas

For anyone with busfare and a harmonica, The Original Amateur Hour was a grab at the brass ring. Some came without busfare, hitching rides across the country. Poor blacks came up from the South; cowboys from the West. Freak acts came from everywhere. Many had sung in choirs back home. Some had played tank towns in the corn belt, with three-piece combos held together by long strings of one-night stands. They were supposed to be “simon pures,” strictly amateur, but who was to know? The common denominator was desperation. The Depression hung over the nation like a shroud. If a man with a smooth baritone singing voice was told by enough friends that he sounded better than Bing Crosby, he began to believe it. Major Bowes gave him a chance to prove it.

Max Weber, for example, made the mistake. He imagined that the Protestant ethic encouraged hard work and high saving, instancing Benjamin Franklin. Weber didn’t get the joke about Father Abraham and a penny saved (few have, actually). Franklin’s special gift was not working hard—which hard work, after all, the peasant planting rice does daily. His gift was innovation, at a frenetic rate, for which he was honored and required no patents for—his stove, bifocals, battery, street lighting, postal sorting shelves, the lightning rod, the flexible catheter, the glass harmonica, a map of the Gulf Stream, and the theory of electricity.

She belted along to the throbbing music as she worked. “Punch ’em in the face! Monkeys like it, too!” “Hey. Kizzy,” Jenks said. “I ate a har—monica! These socks—match—my hat!” “Kizzy.” A tool clattered to the ground. Kizzy’s hands clenched into fists as the music swelled to a stormy crescendo. She danced atop the shuddering ladder, her head still in the ceiling. “Socks! Match—my hat! Socks! Match—my hat! Step on—some—sweet—toast! Socks! Match—my hat!” “Kizzy!” Kizzy ducked her head down. She pressed the clicker strapped to her wrist, turning down the volume of the nearby thump box. “’Sup?” Jenks quirked an eyebrow. “Do you have any idea what this song is?” Kizzy blinked. “Socks Match My Hat,” she said. She went back up into the ceiling, tightening something with her gloved hands. “Soskh Matsh Mae’ha. It’s banned in the Harmagian Protectorate.” “We’re not in the Harmagian Protectorate.” “Do you know what this song’s about?” “You know I don’t speak Hanto.” “Banging the Harmagian royal family. In glorious detail.” “Ha! Oh, I like this song so much more now.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times had reviewed a Greenwich Village performance by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan. “His clothes may need a bit of tailoring,” Shelton wrote of Dylan, “but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano, and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Just Plain Bill was one of the biggest (and first) successes of daytime radio, enjoying a run of more than two decades. It exploited a favored theme of producers Frank and Anne Hummert: life in a small town. The precise location of Hartville was not revealed, but it was always thought to be somewhere in the Midwest. The serial was unusual in at least two aspects: the protagonist was male, and the musical bridges were played on guitar and harmonica, giving it a sound quite unlike the organ-drenched serials around it. Bill Davidson was one of the first great philosophers of serial drama. He was the male counterpart of Ma Perkins, predating that staunch old mother of the air by almost a year. He ran a barbershop, but what Bill did best was meddle in the lives of his friends, all for their own good. He got involved under protest, arguing in that marvelously caring voice that “this is really none of my affair” while the announcer returned to put it in perspective: How can Bill, drawn into the middle of this romantic triangle, straighten out the lives of his friends?

The Boy walked on playing his harmonica, stepping on the fragments of the long road's dream. And the color, on a night so blue, made him want to cry...

Among musical instruments, only the first—the human voice—is more universal than the harmonica. This is appropriate, given that the mouth organ is the most ventriloquial of musical devices. “I throw my voice,” explains Lonnie Glosson, the seller of millions of “talking harmonicas.” DeFord Bailey, harmonica star of the early Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, approached his first mouth organ as an impressionist would: “Oh, I would wear it out, trying to imitate everything I heard! Hens, foxes, hounds, turkeys . . . everything around me.

You made him a happy man, so,” Mart says, turning off the main road and shifting gears with a nasty crunching noise. “Bobby’s not mad. All that’s wrong with him is he spends too much time at the farm work. It’s grand work, but unless a man’s pure thick, it can leave his mind restless. Most of us have something to look after that: the family, or the cards, or the drink, or what-have-you. But Bobby’s a bachelor, he’s got no head for the drink, and he’s that bad at cards we won’t have him in our game. When his mind does get restless, he’s got no option but to head up the hills hunting UFOs. The lads want to buy him a harmonica, give him something else to occupy him, but I’d rather listen to him go on about aliens any day.

Betty” even kicks off with a harmonica solo straight from Bruce Springsteen’s boy/girl/car classic “Thunder Road”—a song that begins with the slamming screen door where Taylor began her own story in “Our Song.

A blues harmonica player doesn't just play notes—they tell stories with every breath, bending sorrow into beauty and struggle into soul.

He wanted to work for the National Weather Service but had to drop out of his college program to take on full custody of his little sisters when his mom decided to join a traveling harmonica band.

Today. We. Have. Everything. You see, we now live in an age where markets—especially those with high purchasing power—are overserved to the point of absurdity. Let’s start with the fact that we now have over 4 million apps for just about everything—from monitoring your health and tracking your pet’s habits to making harmonica sounds with an iPhone in your mouth or using the chat app Yo—which exists solely to send your friends the word "Yo." The latter, by the way, managed to raise $1 million in seed funding.