Abstract
Abstract This essay explores the transformation of blues harmonica education in recent decades, via changes in the racial cohorts of teachers and students, emergence of digital technologies and dematerialization of teaching contexts. As a by-product of the ‘whitening’ of the American blues scene between 1960 and 1970, ‘old-school’ pedagogical exchanges constituted by black masters and apprentices modulated to include white apprentices. Tony ‘Little Sun’ Glover’s instructional Blues Harp (1965) marks a key transition: an erstwhile white master engaging in distance learning with an invisible cohort of students. Subsequently, literature scholar and blues harp player/teacher, Gussow, vowed to ‘give it all away on YouTube’, creating a pioneering website for peddling instructional videos. He also interrogates racial problematics of his business model, sketches his blues apprenticeships with older African Americans and concludes with a story about his own younger black apprentice, a Memphis teen who wins a ‘Star Search’ competition, harmonica in hand.
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