Harmonica Frank Floyd
The Missing Link

The vitality silently moaned within us until someone was able to give it a voice...

Greil Marcus...

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“The missing link,” is an album that moves with surprising freshness between rural music, blues, and rockabilly and possesses a kind of fabulous enchantment like the “Basement tapes”

Clear, true, and unpolished, it was recorded in the late seventies by an eccentric and lively old man named Harmonica Frank, a guy with a tumultuous and legendary, though little-known, background.

And don't think, please, of the usual esoteric roots delight. There's much, much more here, namely the origin of that little something (what?) that us basic folk love so much.

That this gentleman when young “had a voice so rough it made the rubbing of sandpaper feel like a caress”...

And if you listen to track one, namely “Rocking chair daddy,” you'll hear something like “I never went to school, I never went to college, I'm just a crazy man who rocks”...

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Here's how it went...

In the early fifties, our Harmonica is almost forty and has seen it all.

Soon orphaned, he's raised by his grandparents until, still a young lad, he leaves home and works wherever he can.

Then he begins to play...

And he plays in every possible place...“I played in old vaudeville shows, medicine shows, on the streets, in barbershops, in courts, at auctions, in lumberjack halls...name a place and I've played there”

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But Harmonica Frank is above all a buffoon...

In other words, someone who, to live, has to entertain the audience, and to do so, he resorts to all sorts of trade tricks. For example, he's great at doing impressions. He also does well with salacious stories and spicy topics...

“I'm a screaming son of a gun!!!!” he cries...

“And (BUT THIS IS IMPLIED) you, you are idiots!!!!”

To all this, he adds almost circus-like acts with the harmonica: he plays it with his nose and, holding it in his mouth like a cigar, he plays it while singing.

Thus, amidst jests and street creative instinct, he matures a highly personal musical style where a marvelous and graceless voice combines with the bizarre vitality of the sound.

And what comes out is something never heard before.

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Then the encounter with Sam Philips, owner of Sun Records and future discoverer of Elvis.

Sam Philips has sharp ears and has been in the dark search for something that seems to exist only in his mind.

Something between the old blues he had heard as a boy and an undefined spark that only a few can imagine.

Of one thing, however, he's sure: “If I could find a white man with the sound and feel of the black man, I could make a billion dollars..”

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Harmonica is white and has the feel of the black man, oh yes, he does...

“Please, give me something different,” says Sam then.

Something different? Excellent.

What could be more different than a guy like Harmonica Frank?

He just has to be himself.

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So Sam has him record several tracks then passes almost all of them to Chess, another record company.

He keeps only “Rocking chair daddy” and “The great medical menagerist,” respectively side a and side b of the first white music forty-five released by Sun Records.

“The great medical menagerist,” is a fabulous talking blues and starts like this: “ladies and gentlemen, white cough evaders and shagging bunnies, gather round, I'll tell you of a wonderful medicine show, where I used to work, the first I introduce is doctor bathroom...”

So his life on the road, then...

And a mad reversal where, through sarcastic smiles and uneducated language, the ordinary becomes monstrous.

In short, the very best of the screaming son of a gun.

As for “Rocking chair daddy,” well ““Rocking chair daddy,” according to some, even defines the parameters of rock'n'roll...

Rock'n'roll?

Yes, rock'n'roll... that is, and we repeat, a highly personal style where a wonderful and graceless voice combines with the bizarre vitality of the sound.

Rock'n'roll a moment before Elvis...

Only Harmonica no one cares about...

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“I just want to say one thing: the first time I played a rock'n'roll track, I swear, I had never heard anyone else doing that stuff... and I saw Elvis around Memphis before he ever made a record with Sam”

Never mind, Harmonica...in fact, maybe you even got off better...look at what happened to Elvis.

While you were still around in '79 and recording an album like this...

And we want you just like that: rocker for fun or by chance...a cacophonic singer with a voice full of frogs...creator of a fabulous upside-down world where what is usually considered noble has the same value as a fart...

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And finally, a debt must be repaid to Greil Marcus, it's thanks to his “Mystery train,” that I was able to write this piece.

I wrote it dry, dry... but some thoughts of Greil I want to share with you.

“Harmonica Frank did much more than keep the legend of Huckleberry Finn alive: he lived it firsthand. He showcased himself, made his records, disappeared around the world, keeping himself free from an oppression that he never cared to define”

“His humor, that sharp spirit, came as in Mark Twain, from that part of American inventiveness that always mocked the limitations imposed by good manners”

“In a broad sense, we can hear Harmonica Frank every time a rocker unveils a hidden smile"...

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The album, recorded partly in studio and partly live in two schools in Memphis, is a sort of direct-take anthology and contains, besides the tracks I told you about, other fabulous artifacts unavailable in the original editions.

It shows very well how he moved between genres and how rock was just a brief, fabulous, parenthesis.

How is it? Beautiful...

And it moves with surprising freshness between rural music, blues, and rockabilly and possesses a kind of fabulous enchantment like the “Basement tapes.”

But I've already said that...

Aloha...