Years ago, when I first took up the harmonica, there was no way of knowing how to play. No internet, with helpful videos on YouTube. No Amazon to show me books. Having been inspired by Sonny Boy Williamson II, I spent what memory tells me is years trying to make my harmonica sound like his. Then, in circumstances too complicated to describe here, I met Alex Spall, who said, “You gotta suck.” It changed everything.
Before long I was beginning to get good. Then I heard Paul Jones tell listeners to his blues show on Radio 2 about a book by Tony Glover.
“If you want to play harmonica,” he said, “get Tony Glover’s book.”
To this day, I don’t remember how I found the book. I have a feeling it was just there one day in a rack in a music shop, next to Bert Weedon’s Play In A Day.
There was a generic picture on the cover of a black guy in a suit, wearing the standard-issue bluesman hat, and glasses that might have been shades, suggesting he might be blind.
“Blues Harp”, it said. “A complete, clear instruction method.” It was by Tony ‘Little Sun’ Glover.
Well, it wasn’t that clear and it certainly wasn’t complete. But it was written in a swinging post-Beat style that made it an entertaining read even if you had no intention of playing the harmonica. It also had a whole section devoted to potted biographies of the great blues harmonica players, which made it my first book of blues history. Whoever he was, this ‘Little Sun’, he kick-started a lifelong passion for playing, singing and writing about the blues.
On the back there was another potted biography, which was the publisher’s information about the author.
“Tony Glover,” it said, “recorded and, from early to the mid-sixties, toured with the acoustic, folk-blues trio Koerner, Ray, and Glover.”
It also said he worked as an all-night DJ in Minneapolis and that he had written articles and reviews for Rolling Stone, Sing Out, Circus, and Junior Scholastic. I don’t know if Junior Scholastic is still published, but it sounds like an absorbing read. It would certainly make me want to be a junior scholar again if it were publishing swinging music writing on a regular basis.
Naturally, I scoured record shops for signs of Koerner, Ray, and Glover but they seemed to be long out of favour. And then along came the internet and everything was possible again. Amazon presented me with Blues, Rags and Hollers and Lots More Blues, Rags and Hollers by Koerner, Ray, and Glover and I got to hear Tony Glover play for the first time. He had a distinctive, trilling style that owed a lot more to folk music than it did to the Chicago blues I had fallen in love with. Still, these were collections of old American songs played with gusto and sung with real power, though not by Tony Glover, who said himself that he was no kind of singer.
Slowly, an understanding of who Tony Glover was beginning to take shape. There was some information on the web and I could see that he was still performing in the 400 Bar in Minneapolis, sometimes with ‘Spider’ John Koerner. My friend Matthew turned out to have a recent live album of the trio in concert called One Foot In The Groove and Amazon duly obliged. A reissue of The Return of Koerner, Ray, and Glover even had liner notes by the man himself. There was that swinging, sardonic style.
By now Tony Glover was becoming something of a cult figure for me, if one person can form a cult. I think it was the late-night DJ thing, fuelled by the fact that somehow the audio from the record that had originally accompanied the book become available online. Now I could hear him speak.
Minnesotans have a lazy drawl that must be born of the weather and the proximity to Canada. Just watch the movie Fargo to get a sense of it. Everything seems to move a little more slowly, and the weather gives people a bit of perspective; they’ve had plenty of exposure to reality. Tony’s voice feels as though it’s got a permanent sigh of resignation lurking not far in the background. For a late-night DJ, it was a gift from the Universe.
The record itself is pretty clunky, with a distinctly home-made feel to it. The harp demonstrations are far from perfect, but it’s enough to give you the gist and to give you the confidence to go for it. If this guy can get away with it, there’s hope for us all.
With any kind of hero-worship there’s a twinge of jealousy. You experience a combination of admiration, aspiration and despair. “What a genius,” battles with, “lucky bastard,” the envy made more poignant by the knowledge that luck has very little to do with it.
I began to feel that Tony Glover was living the life I should have led, writing for a living about stuff he loved and blowing harp for spare cash and a few beers in between. As with many smitten worshippers, I failed to notice that I wasn’t far off living the same life, except I wasn’t a late-night DJ and I was writing about stuff I didn’t care about.
And of course, I was nowhere near as cool.
Then my occasional searches revealed that a documentary about Koerner, Ray, and Glover had been released on DVD. A clip on YouTube revealed the treat that lay in store. Once again Amazon obliged and I could put a figure to the voice and the face I had only seen in photographs. He was lean and languid, small and slightly awkward, a legacy of childhood polio, which somehow added to the cool. There were moody shoots of him silhouetted in a tunnel, or walking across the wagons in a railroad yard. In one grainy black and white moment he was seated at a typewriter, apparently pecking out a piece with one finger of one hand. Perhaps he was even typing the book.
In the film, much was made of the fact that Koerner, Ray, and Glover came from the same Minneapolis folk scene as Bob Dylan. They played together and hung out; they remained lifelong friends. It also emerged that Tony Glover had had a thing with Patti Smith. He just got cooler and cooler.
When you play blues harmonica, the ghost of Little Walter haunts everything you do. Little Walter Jacobs (real name Marion Walter Jacobs) was the harmonica player who defined the Chicago blues sound, first with the band of Muddy Waters and then with his own group, three masterful players known as The Aces. He it was who popularised the big, horn-like sounds that became synonymous with the Chicago style.
Funnily enough, he never quite did it for me, I think probably because he wasn’t a great singer. Sonny Boy Williamson II, the other giant of Chicago blues harp, was more my man. In the book, Tony Glover singled Sonny Boy out as the greatest poet of the blues. Indeed, Blues Harp is dedicated to Kenneth Patchen and Sonny Boy Williamson II, “the two greatest poets of our times.”
Still, if you play blues harp, you can’t get away from Walter Jacobs. So it wasn’t at all surprising to discover that Tony Glover’s next contribution to the cultural history of the blues was Blues With A Feeling, the definitive biography of Little Walter. He wrote it in partnership with Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines.
Gone was the swing of Blues Harp; this was Glover the journalist and musicologist. The three authors had completed years of research and produced a book dense with detail, making it an essential read for anyone who loves blues, whether they are a fan of Little Walter or not.
For me, there was a particular pull. The Aces, Walter’s backing band, were up there among my Gods of the Blues and had been central to one of the projects that had shaped my life is a writer, as well as defining my musical journey.
If we go back-a-ways, to paraphrase Tony Glover, my journey into the blues was directed by Alexis Korner (not to be confused with ‘Spider’ John Koerner), the man who did more than anyone to bring the blues to white audiences. A bold claim, but it will stand close examination. It was he that first introduced me to Robert Johnson, the king of the Delta blues singers, as part of a radio biography of Jimi Hendrix. And it was his 1970s TV series The Blues, still available in the BBC iPlayer archive, that showed me The Aces: Louis Myers, guitar, his brother Dave on bass, and Fred Below on drums.
“They are,” said Alexis Korner, “the tightest and yet the loosest band in Chicago.”
It was the first time I heard the blues shuffle, the irresistible groove that is the essence of the Chicago sound and of which Below was the definitive master. Not long after – I have a feeling it was the following day but it probably wasn’t – I travelled into London and went to Tower Records, the monumental music shop that once dominated Piccadilly Circus. There in the rack was a sepia-orange LP with grainy shots of the Myers brothers and Below. The Aces and their Guests Live in Chicago. If had dared to dream what I might find, this was it.
If I put it on today, it still has the same effect it had on me the first time the needle dropped into the groove. It’s a physical release of tension; I slip into a state of calm and excitement as my foot begins to tap and a deep sigh pushes stress out of me. When I formed my first blues band with my friend Martin Turner, which he named Mr. Charlie, it was the beginning of a search for that same sound that has eluded me for 35 years, despite many attempts. Even my beloved Shufflepack doesn’t quite get there.
Still, the other thing the record led me to was the story of Marcelle Morgantini, the French woman who made the original recording. She had died by the time I started my research but her husband Jacques was very much alive.
I travelled down to Gan, near Pau in southern France, and spent a day interviewing him. This was my first real piece of music journalism and it was published in Living Blues magazine, a highly respected journal in the world I loved.
Jacques was a big noise in the French blues and jazz scene and had promoted tours with some of the biggest names in the business. He and Marcelle had become close friends with many of the musicians, including Fred Below. While I was there, he played me a recording of a Below drum solo – an unheard-of event – recorded on a single snare drum in the family living room at Gan. And there was the Nad portable tape recorder on which Marcelle had made the recording that changed my life. I felt like an artist in the presence of Picasso’s palette.
I managed to interview Jimmy Dawkins and Magic Slim for the article, both of whom had been recorded by Marcelle. But The Aces were all long gone. Which is why Tony Glover’s biography of Little Walter had so strong an appeal. Here, surely, would be some account of The Aces and their travels with Little Walter.
Sure enough, there they were, long accounts of life on the road and the kind of insight into the man that was Little Walter that you can only get by sharing that life with him.
There’s a problem when you’re a white, middle-class Englishman who wants to play the blues. Its history is so bound up with slavery and racism that somehow you have no place in it. This language is not your language.
You cannot possibly know how it feels to arrive at a Swiss hotel as the star of a touring show and be told you must go round to the back entrance, as Jimmy Johnson told me in his interview about Marcelle. My search for the shuffle and groove that began more than 45 years ago has always been dogged by the notion of futility, by the idea that if I have not truly lived it then I cannot truly play it. My answer is to point to the impact that the blues has had right around the world, touching people of every conceivable identity. Nearly all of modern popular music is born of the blues. If ever a music could claim to hold universal truths, it is the blues.
Every record, every book, every article, every encounter with someone who has been close to the source helps to bring me closer to it. And the closer I get, the surer I am that this is nothing to do with playing the music right, or being born in the right place, or having experienced a particular kind of suffering. This is about who you are, no matter who you are. The question is not, “Do you have the right to play the blues?” it’s, “Do you have the courage?” The blues is music that dares you to play it.
These people, Tony Glover, The Aces, Marcelle and Jacques, even Alex “you gotta suck” Spall, have laid deep foundations in my understanding of who I am. And this is why they have achieved the status of deities for me, not that I want to emulate them, but because they call me on, they show me what is possible, they encourage and inspire me, and they daunt me and haunt me. There is a thread that weaves them together, not just the blues but a spun yarn that binds Jack Kerouac and Charlie Parker and Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and Kenneth Patchen and Gregory Corso and Jerry Garcia and Ken Kesey and countless others who have snaked a golden way through my life. They live in the silence between songs and on the blank page and they say, “Go on then, who are you? What do you have to say? How will you take these things we have given you and make of them something that only you can make, that we could never make?”
Perhaps in seeking out Marcelle, reaching for The Aces and piecing together Tony Glover I am trying to make them more human. It is in the nature of worship to deify the object while trying to get closer to it, to make it real and accessible. God needed to take human form before He could achieve world domination. So we want artefacts and tokens of our gods, whether they are autographs or, in the music world, ‘merch’ – t-shirts, badges, and all the other paraphernalia of devotion that mark you out as a true follower.
I am a collector by nature so I make connections between these articles of my many faiths that turn the golden thread into a rosary. Alexis led me to The Aces, Jerry Garcia led me to Ken Kesey, who led me to Jack Kerouac, who brought me to Beat poetry, which made me want to write for myself, so I follow the thread from The Aces to Marcelle Morgantini and craft a corner of blues history that makes me want to write something else, so I write to Tony Glover and say I’d like to write about him, but, through his wife Cynthia Nadler, he politely refuses but says that the Marcelle article (which I sent him as evidence of my bona fides) is a nice piece of work. Something like that, the email is buried deep in an archive somewhere. Every connection opens another door for a bit of me to pass through, blinking in the light of recognition.
People talk of bucket lists. I never had one until I had to write about something that was on my bucket list as part of a business exercise. The only thing I could think of was to see the band Bongripper live. Within the year they had booked a tour that would bring them from Chicago – like the blues, they are Chicago-based, playing “miserable Chicago doom” – to a festival at Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. I made the trip by train and had a ball. The only other thing that might have counted was that I had a vague inclination to see the Pacific Ocean before I died. This I achieved as an unplanned bonus when I went to Panama for my son’s thirtieth birthday. Clearly, my bucket list needed to be bit more ambitious.
Into my head came the idea that I would like to see Tony Glover play at the 400 Bar. Whenever a trip to America was mooted (I have never been) I would say that I would only go on condition that we would go to Minneapolis and see Tony Glover play. This was the limit of my ambition; my fear of flying, Panama notwithstanding, made it an unfeasible dream.
Occasionally, especially post-Panama, I would toy with the idea again and check the rudimentary Tony Glover website to see if he was playing. And then one day the flickering dream fizzled out because Tony Glover died. May 29, 2019. He was in his eightieth year.
I pondered the impact that this minor character in the history of the music I loved had had upon me. I recalled that for a good while, I had called myself Stuart ‘Son’ Maxwell, as a kind of half-baked tribute to him and Sonny Boy Williamson II. I was pretty sure the ‘Little Sun’ was affected so I figured there was no harm in affecting my own moniker. One of my attempts to form an Aces-like combo was even called Son Maxwell’s Unruly Blues (Maxwell is my middle name). It didn’t work as a shuffling band but it did hold down a residency in West London for several years, in the fine tradition of the British blues. The fact was, Tony Glover had been one of the cores of the golden thread.
By now, I was happy that I had explored the avenues of my own writing and playing that he had opened up. I was writing regular jazz and blues reviews that were getting warm receptions. I was blowing harp in an acoustic duo and enjoying the freedom that came from playing at low volume. I had even written my own harmonica tutor book, The Complete Harmonica Player (not a title I chose), which I based on Blues Harp, combining lessons with a little history. I wasn’t a late-night DJ, but there’s still plenty of time.
I made a mental note to make a pilgrimage to the 400 Bar anyway and wondered if a distant relative of mine, Dave Arcari, had ever played there. He’s a wild Scotsman who plays fierce slide acoustic guitar and regularly tours America. I wondered if it was on his itinerary. Lockdown stopped all touring, but I searched the 400 Bar giglist to see if it was still a working venue. And somehow in the process I came across a remarkable thing. Cynthia Nadler, Tony Glover’s widow, was auctioning his archive.
There was considerable interest because at the heart of the collection was his correspondence with Bob Dylan, dating from the earliest days of the Minneapolis folk scene until Tony Glover’s death. I’m a Dylan fan – my beloved running companion Dylan, a characterful labrador-collie cross, was named after him – but it was not that part of the archive that caught my eye.
First, there was Tony Glover’s collection of harmonicas, including his cherished Hohner Marine Bands. Second was his ‘Lifetime Writer Archive’. In this there was a set of cassette tapes, that included interviews with blues and folk legends, among them James Cotton and Big Walter Horton, two outstanding harmonica players, and Dave Myers of The Aces.
Also included was a Shure 520D Green Bullet microphone, which was no doubt there because Ms Nadler thought it was part of Tony Glover’s recording equipment for interviews. It wasn’t; it was the mic he used on the rare occasions when he wanted to play amplified harp. It’s the industry-standard harp mic, through which his very breath and all kinds of other stuff must have passed.
There were two smart ballpoint pens in a wooden case. And there was a typewriter.
A word about me and typewriters. I have written elsewhere about my love of them. I learned my trade on them and still use software that makes my computer sound like one. Years ago, visiting in-laws in Skipton in Yorkshire, I found an old Underwood portable typewriter in an antiques warehouse. It looked a lot like the typewriter that features on the cover of several Jack Kerouac books (the Flamingo Modern Classics editions), although proper examination showed that it was not the same at all. Still, it was a lovely artefact, even though it didn’t work. It has sat on my desk or on a shelf nearby for 25 years or so. In recent years I have attached a strip to the case that quotes Desiderata: “No doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.” On the typewriter itself was a quote from Jack himself: “I promise I shall never give up and that I will die yelling and laughing.”
The Underwood was a totem carrier, there to root me in my heritage as a professional and my calling as a writer, with the gentle reminder from Desiderata of my spiritual inclinations. (And of Les Crane’s Shatner-esque recording of the piece, which was one of the first singles I ever bought and is still a guilty pleasure.)
Until one day I looked at the Underwood and thought, “Why should it just be an ornament?” A search revealed The Typewriter Man, who resided in Luton. His name was Tom Lucas and a brief exchange of emails revealed him to be a man of earnest engineering meticulousness. Exactly the kind of person to whom you would entrust a treasured symbol of your aspirations and beliefs.
Before I could get to Luton, lockdown struck and everything went on hold. And then I found the auction of Tony Glover’s writing life.
There were two weeks to go. This was no eBay affair, it was the real deal, run by RR Auctions of Boston. Words of wisdom known to every smart gambler rang in my ears: never bet more than you can afford to lose. I bid as much as I dare on two lots: the harmonicas and the writing collection. If I won both I would be obliged to pay a sum that I could afford but that would definitely make my eyes water.
Over the next few days, I watched as the bidding on the harmonicas sailed past my maximum bid. The writing collection remained unmoved, with me as highest bidder.
Came the day of the auction and an email arrived telling me that I had unfortunately been unsuccessful in my bid for the harmonicas. Then another email came. Congratulations, I had won the auction for Tony Glover’s Lifetime Writer Collection, including typewriter.
The typewriter on which I am typing this now. The one that Tony Glover is typing on with one languid hand in the documentary. The one on which he wrote Blues Harp.
It is a Remington Quiet-Riter. Pale matt green, with dark green plastic keys. Tom, when he had serviced it, said that it was pretty badly worn and had had a few repairs by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing. Which somehow made it all the more real. This is not a collector’s item, it’s a properly knackered workhorse that has had to be patched up as best as was possible.
Tom got the Underwood going as well. He said both machines are pretty clunky and were not brilliant even when new. But he understood their sentimental value, despite the fact that I had paid far more for their repair then they would fetch on the open market. But Tom’s like that. It’s why he’s so good at bringing typewriters back to life.
The Remington was working when it arrived. Gingerly, hurtling back forty years to my earliest days in PR, I scrolled a piece of paper into it and picked out, “This is Tony Glover’s typewriter.”
Except I didn’t. I couldn’t find the apostrophe and I typed a comma by mistake. So the first thing I wrote on this typewriter was:

This is Tony Glover,

Probably just a coincidence I guess.
As I finish this I know that in order to share it I will have to scan it into my phone, clean it up and then subject it to the clinical homogeneity of digitisation. Yet I believe that the manner of this piece’s creation will not be compromised by the translation. I would have written differently on a computer. Perhaps I would have written differently on the Underwood. So this stands as a piece that could only have originated on this machine.
I don’t know when I will type with this machine again. It was always my intention to make the Underwood my workhorse. Frankly, neither machine is any good really, Tom said, so perhaps I need another one, the way you can’t have too many guitars. Tom says he has a nice Imperial in stock that would be just the job as a working machine.
This Remington has spoken, though. The keys that Tony Glover pecked away at (Dylan too? “Hey Tony, can I borrow your typewriter?”) have now shaped my own writing. This machine will always remind me that there are words to get down on paper, just as its illustrious keeper tapped out a living with it for three decades.
It will sit in its place in my room and call to me with the words that Tony Glover used to conclude Blues Harp, paraphrasing Jack Kerouac:

Go thou and blow now.