Biography
Palmer McAbee distinguished himself among the first generation of American harmonica virtuosos through his singular ability to evoke locomotive sounds. Although numerous players have tried to replicate the noise of a train arriving at the station, few matched McAbee’s blend of inventive detail and intensity; he sometimes achieved both lifelike and otherworldly results by directing air across the top of the instrument. His early sides now appear on various compilations centered on country blues and, more narrowly, harmonica technique. Rounder’s anthology The Train 45 gathers only railroad-themed material, whether instrumental imitations or narrative songs, or both. Listeners seeking relief from that single subject can instead locate his “McAbee’s Railroad Piece” on assorted blues collections.
A terse annotation reading “This artist may be white” illustrates how little concrete information survives about McAbee. Within early folk and blues scholarship, any lingering doubt concerning an artist’s race is routinely treated as high praise. Not every reissue agrees: the notes to one New World collection of Southern instrumental traditions state that “one track by Palmer McAbee, the rest of the artists are white.” Attempts to infer race solely from harmonica phrasing are futile; the Indigo set Devil in the Woodpile: Blues Harmonica 1926-1940 further confuses the matter by crediting two McAbee performances that are actually the work of George “Bullet” Williams. McAbee himself came from Alabama, though his Victor sessions took place in Atlanta, Georgia. In either state his racial identity would once have carried decisive weight, yet harmonica enthusiasts concentrate instead on his technical command and tonal effects, ranking him alongside only Noah Lewis and Freeman Stowers. McAbee is equally noted for restraint; as one participant in an online harmonica forum observed, his pieces deliver “the same great chug, without all the falsetto nonsense.” He made his well-known recordings for Victor in 1928, a date sometimes misidentified as his birth year—an error that would render his appearances on 1920s and 1930s anthologies chronologically impossible, given the sophistication of the playing.
A terse annotation reading “This artist may be white” illustrates how little concrete information survives about McAbee. Within early folk and blues scholarship, any lingering doubt concerning an artist’s race is routinely treated as high praise. Not every reissue agrees: the notes to one New World collection of Southern instrumental traditions state that “one track by Palmer McAbee, the rest of the artists are white.” Attempts to infer race solely from harmonica phrasing are futile; the Indigo set Devil in the Woodpile: Blues Harmonica 1926-1940 further confuses the matter by crediting two McAbee performances that are actually the work of George “Bullet” Williams. McAbee himself came from Alabama, though his Victor sessions took place in Atlanta, Georgia. In either state his racial identity would once have carried decisive weight, yet harmonica enthusiasts concentrate instead on his technical command and tonal effects, ranking him alongside only Noah Lewis and Freeman Stowers. McAbee is equally noted for restraint; as one participant in an online harmonica forum observed, his pieces deliver “the same great chug, without all the falsetto nonsense.” He made his well-known recordings for Victor in 1928, a date sometimes misidentified as his birth year—an error that would render his appearances on 1920s and 1930s anthologies chronologically impossible, given the sophistication of the playing.