6:00 pm -- Blues Harmonica Workshop - For Beginners and Others official Hohner endorser ~ Adam Gussow
Visitor's Center

Have you always dreamed of making bluesy sounds on the harmonica? Here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor and learn the basics from a Mississippi-based pro, Adam Gussow. 

Whether you’re a fan of Chicago blues players like Little Walter, Junior Wells, and James Cotton, Mississippi legends like Jimmy Reed, or country bluesmen like Sonny Terry, Gussow will help you decode what the masters are doing and take your first steps on the instrument. Topics to be covered include how to hold the harp; how to make single notes, double stops, and chords; how to play a basic chord rhythm or two; and how to bend notes for that familiar mournful wail.

No prior experience is needed to attend this combination lecture/demonstration and hands-on workshop, but if you want to participate you will need to bring a standard 10-hole diatonic harmonica in the key of C. Gussow will also have a limited number of harmonicas for sale. ($20 each; cash, check, or Venmo.)

ADAM GUSSOW, who has been teaching English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi for more than two decades, is one of the best-known blues harmonica instructors in the world, thanks to his pair of YouTube channels that together have more than 250,000 subscribers and 35 million views.  As a longtime member of the blues duo Satan and Adam, working with the Mississippi-born Harlem street legend, Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, he was featured in a 2018 Netflix documentary, Satan & Adam. His current act, blues trio Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors, features Magee’s nephew, Roderick “Sir Rod” Patterson. 

Gussow is the author of many books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice:  A Blues Memoir (1998) and Beyond the Crossroads:  The Devil and the Blues Tradition (2017). He is delighted to be visiting Lewisburg with his son, Shaun, to promote his new book, My Family and I:  A Mississippi Memoir.  (Father and son will be playing the festival’s after-party.)