Little Walter: The Greatest Of All Time

Why Do We Make Such A Big Deal About This Guy?

For Boxing, it’s Ali.

For the guitar, it’s Hendrix.

For writers, it’s Shakespeare.

In any field of art or sports, we have those unique individuals that we collectively recognize as the “greatest of all time.” We recognize them for their originality, voice, incredible technical skill, and character. But, most of all, we see that their respective fields were forever, irrevocably changed by their involvement and innovations. The landscape was shifted, and the mentality of future players was altered by the insights and un-ignorable virtuosity these “GOATS” brought to the table.

For the harmonica, there is no other answer to “who’s the greatest” than Marion Walter Jacobs.

It’s not a dogmatic statement, nor does it come with any brainwashing or cult mentality that has been pushed on me by older players. When it comes to blues harmonica, there’s a clear line in the sand: players who existed before Walter and players who existed after Walter.

Little Walter's recordings are not just a part of the blues harmonica history; they are the history. There is no blues harmonica as we know it today without the transformative influence of Little Walter's recordings.

So, what's the deal with this guy? Why, even after all the incredible players who preceded and followed him, do we classify this harmonica player as the greatest ever to play it? Why, 56 years after his death, do we continue to worship him?

I’ll try to explain.

The complete recordings of Little Walter constitute a musical bible for any up-and-coming harmonica player. No matter what stage of your harmonica journey, there is a Little Walter song that you could and should be studying. There is always something for you to unpack, break down, tab out, and mimic.

Greatness requires evidence. Some musicians will never be known to the world simply because they were never given a chance to record in a studio, let alone with top-class musicians like Jimmy Rodgers and Muddy Waters. Walter’s catalog, from early acoustic recordings to the haunting Blue and Lonesome, is unparalleled in its emotional and technical ability.

Try as we might, it's tough to find a song Little Walter recorded that isn’t awesome.

I’ve been asked by many young players, “Do you think it’s still necessary to study Little Walter?” My response is always the same:

“You come to Walter when you come to Walter…but you can’t hope to play blues harmonica and not study him.”

Part of the journey of being a blues harmonica player is passing through the years of obsession and frustration that studying Walter will do to a player. One could argue that this labor of love is one of the most essential aspects of improvement.

For years, as a younger player, I avoided his recordings because I stupidly thought he was outdated. The older I got, the more I realized how false that cockiness was. The more I realized how implicit he was in everything I had heard, the more I approached him with a newfound respect.

Walter’s repertoire is not only vast but varied in their technical difficulty. Not all of his recordings are impossible to follow/impossible to break down. He makes a perfect player to study over the long term and to return to endlessly. No matter what area of blues harmonica you are interested in developing, you will find something to work on, to scratch your head at, when plundering his expansive oeuvre.

It’s almost a cliche at this point to say that Little Walter was an innovator. He was the man who took the harmonica into a realm it was never designed to go: the realm of amplification. No longer were harmonica players victims to their acoustic, unfriendly environments. Simply by cupping the harmonica into a mic and amp, he transformed the shape, feel, and tone of an instrument that had never been altered in such a dramatic way since its birth. He gave us equal footing next to the guitar and saxophone players. He raised us from being an afterthought to being the central solo men and women on a blues stage.

After Little Walter’s masterpiece “Juke” was released, it became the norm for Chicago blues bands to carry an amplified harmonica player in their lineups. Walter paved the way for all those who came after him (James Cotton, Junior Wells, Paul Butterfield, and so many more). Without this revolutionary recording, I often wonder where harmonica would be today.

“Juke” is only the beginning of Walter’s genius… which is saying a lot.

When you delve into the recordings of Walter, what you happen upon is a complete musician, not just a harmonica player. After repeated listening, you notice his attention to detail, tone, and, most importantly, timing. His ability to swing, play with the band instead of on top of them, listen intently to the singer, and adjust his dynamics based on what the song in question called for all morphed him into more than just another harmonica player.

You hear how harmonically sensitive he was, understanding what notes work against a chord (most notably his IV chord phrases) and how focused he was on the groove.

One of the main issues with blues harmonica players nowadays is not having command of their instrument. It very quickly becomes this mindless act that we can play a blues phrase, which will sound good over all 12 bars. But in his infinite genius, Walter understood that he couldn’t be ignorant of the chords, a lesson we should continue to remind ourselves of.

Because Walter was so influenced by the playing of saxophone players of his time, his phrasing changed and became the up-tempo “Rocker” type of playing that became a style in itself.

We love Walter for his solo work, but the thing that many players first happen upon (and what draws them in) is all of his accompaniment playing. Think of 40 Days and 40 Nights; no other harmonica player could have perfectly executed that part.

Of course, we can’t talk about Little Walter and not talk about his influence. Generations have come and gone, yet his style on the harmonica is still imitated, copied, and studied more than any other player in the history of our instrument.

Harmonica players, particularly blues players, are evaluated at their local jam or on stage with their band by how well they compare to Walter. It’s a mighty mountain to climb and an interesting philosophical question: why is that? Because Walter set the standard for every player that came after him. He defined a higher meaning of what the term” harp player” could mean. He has influenced every major player who has come after him in some way, shape, or form because his domain over the harmonica is so vast.

In his book “The Anxiety of Influence,” Harold Bloom, the former head of the humanities department at Yale University, argues that great poets and writers are all influenced by their predecessors, one way or another. He says that these writer’s work becomes one of two things:

-reacting against what their predecessors have done

-continuing the tradition their predecessors have started

So, when we think about the history of blues harmonica, Walter was that creative force who reacted against his predecessors and did something different. Sure, there have been other innovative harmonica players (Butterfield, George Harmonica Smith, Howard Levy), but they all arrived in a world post-Little Walter.

If the literary world has postmodernism, harmonica players have post-Walterism.

Perhaps Little Walter's greatest aspect was his well-balanced playing. In a great interview with Ross Garren, Jason Ricci discusses melody, rhythm, and harmony as they relate to blues harmonica, pointing out that Walter, more than any other player, encompassed the perfect balance of these three pillars of music. In our journey as harmonica players, we desperately try to find the ideal musical balance that came so naturally to Marion Walter Jacobs.

There is a larger-than-life quality to the recordings of Little Walter. Like reading Shakespeare, you start to see that almost every trope in blues harmonica comes from his recordings. He is always out ahead of us, inexhaustible, and our perception of him will be in constant flux.

There’s a great line from Heraclitus:

“No man steps in the same river twice, for the man is always changing, and the river is always changing.”

With Little Walter, year after year, we return to him with new eyes and realize just how endless his wisdom is. You begin to understand that “blues harmonica,” as we think about it today, was being written and realized when Walter put these recordings out.

He was an undogmatic player: tongue blocked, lip pursed, acoustic, amplified, loud, soft, fast, slow, chromatic, diatonic, shuffle, swing—he did it all. Throughout his incredibly short yet dazzling life, he subverted every norm and stereotype you could apply to the diatonic harmonica.

As I have mentioned in a previous article, there’s a harsh albeit necessary acceptance of being a blues harmonica player: you’ll never measure up to the greatness of Little Walter.

Will you get close?

Maybe.

That’s a beautiful goal to aspire to.