It fits in a shirt pocket. It has ten holes, no keys, no strings and no moving parts to speak of. It costs less than a decent dinner. By any reasonable measure the harmonica is the humblest instrument on a stage, and yet in the right hands it produces the most human sound in all of music. Paddy Smith of Navan, County Meath, has spent a career showing why.
The secret is breath. Nearly every other instrument is struck, plucked, bowed or blown in one direction. The harmonica is played by breathing out and breathing in, and both make music. The player is doing the same thing a singer does, the same thing a person does when laughing or sighing or trying not to cry. When a harp player bends a note, pulling it flat until it wavers, the sound is so close to a voice breaking that listeners feel it before they understand it. The instrument lives in the same place the voice does.
That is why the blues claimed it. The harmonica was built in Germany and shipped to America by the crate, cheap enough for anyone, and it ended up in the pockets of working people across the South. Then came Chicago, where Little Walter, playing alongside Muddy Waters, cupped a microphone against the harp and ran it through an amplifier. Out came something that had never been heard before, a sound as big as a saxophone and far meaner. In the 1960s Paul Butterfield carried that sound to a rock audience and changed what a generation thought the instrument could do.
Smith names both Muddy Waters and Butterfield among the musicians who made him, and he belongs to the Irish branch of the family as well. The blues crossed a second ocean to reach Ireland, where players like Rory Gallagher, who blew a fair harp himself, took it up as their own. Smith has become one of the standard-bearers of that line. His hometown paper calls him one of the finest harmonica players around, and his reputation has long since traveled beyond Ireland.
What makes a singing harmonica player special is a simple physical fact. He cannot do both at once. The mouth that delivers the lyric has to stop before the harp can start. So the song becomes a conversation. He sings a line, and the harmonica answers. Call and response is the oldest structure in the blues, going back to the fields and the churches. In Smith’s case both voices belong to the same man. The harp picks up where the words leave off and finishes the thought, often saying the part that could not be put into words at all.
His album Could Have Found Grace, released August 4 on Tribeca Records, gives that second voice plenty to say. The songs deal in hardship, resilience and redemption, and the harmonica has a part to play in each of those moods. He is surrounded by formidable players: Danny Tobin on guitar, James Delaney on keys, Aongus Ralston on bass and Jason Duffy on drums, with Ivan Jackman producing at Hellfire Studios in Dublin. A band of that quality knows when to step forward and when to leave room, and the room they leave is filled by ten small holes and one man’s breath.
There is a pleasing symmetry in where the instrument has taken him. Smith has recorded a live album in New York, and this past June he returned to headline an industry showcase there for Tribeca and Soho Records. The harmonica left Europe, found its blues voice in America, and traveled back across the water to Ireland. Now an Irishman carries it in his pocket to New York and plays it for the country that taught it to sing.
A guitar can be admired for its craftsmanship and a piano for its grandeur. The harmonica has nothing to recommend it but what the player puts in. It is the smallest instrument in the band, and it runs on the largest thing a musician has to give. For as long as Paddy Smith has breath, his harmonica will have something to say.
Could Have Found Grace is streaming worldwide now via Tribeca Records at found.ee/paddysmith_couldhavefoundgrace-1
