Hangin' with the Harps: Huntington Harmonica Club marks 20 years

Aug. 13—HUNTINGTON — If you ask Jim Rumbaugh about playing the harmonic, he'll give you a straight answer.

"The general wisdom is the harmonica is easy to play good but very, very hard to play very good," Rumbaugh, who calls himself the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Huntington Harmonica Club, said. The group marks its 20th year this month.

Rumbaugh said he was more a harmonica owner than player when he joined the new club in 2001.

"I wanted to learn more about how to play and they taught me how to play," he said.

JoAnne Reinhard of Ashland joined the club in 2005 to learn to play.

"I was always fascinated by it," she said of the harmonica. "When my only child went to college, she would come home on the weekends and when she left, I'd cry. She told me I needed a hobby."

Reinhard is serious about harmonica.

Also a member of the Huntington Blues Society, she takes online lessons from Davis and Elkins College for Blues, where she plays with some of the best. She also takes lessons from Oldtown School of Music in Chicago via Zoom. She has taught harmonica at Charles Russell Elementary School.

"Everyone in the harmonica club takes it very seriously," she said. "It's really all professional people in this — doctors, opticians, psychologists, Marshall professors. We're just people in our 50s and 60s who like to play music."

Harmonica players often have several instruments. Reinhard said she has at least 50 harmonicas, which she said isn't many in the world of the mouth harp.

"You need more than one because what if you're on stage and you blow a reed?" she said, plus harmonicas come in different keys, so players need a variety.

Harmonicas range widely in cost, from a Fender Blues Deville for $35 to a Hohner 7544 Amadeus Chromatic for nearly $2,000.

Reinhard said she plays organ, too.

"Harmonica is 10 times harder to play than organ," she said. "It takes five minutes to learn and five years or more to master."

The club began offering Harmonicollege on occasion. It's an event featuring a nationally or internationally known harmonica player who teaches a daylong workshop on harmonica playing. The club has hosted such performers as blues harmonica player and professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Oxford in Mississippi Adam Gussow and the award-winning Dennis Gruenling.

Guidance from professionals is helpful, Rumbaugh said.

"If you want (the harmonica) to sound right, it can be challenging," he said. "It's an instrument that gets shunned quite a bit. A lot of times, people will see you and say, 'Oh my God, another harmonica player.' They also say a gentleman is a man who knows how to play the harmonica but doesn't."

The club has about six actve harmonica players and there are four backup musicians: a drummer, a bass player and two guitar players, who create a basis for the harmonica music.

Perhaps surprisingly, the pandemic didn't set players back much.

"The club has been like one of those winter frogs that was frozen in the ice and, in spring, thawed out and came back to life," Rumbaugh said. "We're all still here. What's impressed me is that at least a few have practiced during that year that we haven't been together."

The club will mark its 20th anniversary with its performance at the Diamond Teeth Mary Music and Arts Festival on Aug. 20 at Heritage Station in Huntington, where Rumbaugh said he hopes to founding members Eddie-Blue Dawson and Brian Salzers will show up and talk about the creation of the club.

"I also plan to give an oral history of the club and its early days and the changes its been through," he said, adding some members might we willing to talk about their experiences in the club. "There may be more than talking than playing at this anniversary celebration."

Rumbaugh said some club members might offer free lessons in the future to try to build the club's membership.

(606) 326-2661 — lward@dailyindependent.com