Will Scarlett - UPDATED

All eyes turned to the young man in the back of the room, who had raised his hand to ask, “How did you get that note?”

The man onstage with the thousand-watt smile and the shock of blond hair had an old gramophone horn perched on his shoulder, with its slender base curved to where he cupped it in his hands around an unusual looking harmonica.

It was Will Scarlett, visiting the hippie music school the Blue Bear Waltzes School of Genuine Music to give a talk on the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century pioneer in the science of acoustics. Will expounded on acoustics in cosmic terms – after all, this was San Francisco in the early 1970s, just a few years after the Summer of Love.

Will had played an ascending chromatic line on a diatonic harmonica starting on Draw 3 -and had somehow managed to play the note that lies between Draw 4 and Blow 5. This mystified me, as I knew of no way to create that note.

I was 19 and figured I knew everything there was to know about the harmonica. Until that moment. And now all eyes were on me as I shrank a little under all that attention once I’d asked the question (was I the only one who didn't know how he got that note?).Will looked puzzled for a moment, then replied, “Oh, that’s an overblow.” Later, in a phone conversation, he taught me how to do it. And I filed it away as an impractical curiosity, as on the leaky harps of the time, they seemed too hard to achieve without delay and difficulty.

What I didn’t learn until much later was that in 1968, Will had played an entire album with Hot Tuna on that same wood-covered G-harp I’d seen him play at Blue Bear, using it to play in multiple keys with overblows crafted with such care and subtlety that nobody realized what he was doing. Will also hipped me to a recording by Rosalie Sorrels where he bent an overblow up several semitones.

About fifteen years later, I encountered him at a Toots Thielemans club date. The white teeth had eroded some and there were lines in the face, but it was still the same Will, now sporting a cowboy hat – his trademark bowler hat was still in the future. He remembered our earlier encounter despite the passage of time.

In the interim, he’d toured with Sonny Terry’s longtime duo partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee – some huge shoes to fill! Remaining active on the local folk and acoustic scenes, he’d also recorded with a constellation of acoustic music luminaries, including David Bromberg, Jerry Garcia, and David Grisman. He’d also played harmonica on the Angie Dickinson Film “Big Bad Mama.” The list of people he’s performed with is much longer; check his website at http://willscarlett.com/ABOUT.html

When Howard Levy burst on the scene showing, to everyone’s amazement, that it was possible to play fully chromatically – and fast – on the diatonic harmonica with the help of overblows, I made a point of introducing Howard and Will to one another when Howard was in town with Kenny Loggins. At the outset, there was some tension, as Howard had believed he’d discovered the overblow first. But that settled down and they had a very friendly first meeting. The gramophone horn was there, now patched together in spots with duct tape. I tried playing through it and both Will and Howard covered their ears - it really did make the harmonica much louder (I hope it wasn’t my playing that was frightful).

Sometime around that time, Will showed me his three-reed prototype that had a responder reed whose sole function was to allow the blow reed, normally unbendable, to bend down in pitch. He also showed me his patent journal for the invention, which had been witnessed by Rick Epping. I duly signed my witness to it as did, I think, Steve Baker, who was my houseguest at the time.

When I asked Will why he’d abandoned overblows in favor of this idea of an all-bending harp, he replied that he found the physical act of producing overblows to be “unfriendly to the mammal.”

Later it developed that Rick had taken the idea to Hohner and, receiving a positive response, contacted Will and said, “we’ve got a deal.” Will was incensed at this presumption and replied, “There is no we.” But Rick persisted, and eventually developed the XB-40 harmonica using the idea, though he had to solve the problem of the responder reed sounding when it wasn’t wanted during regular draw bends, which he did with an ingenious valving system, which formed the heart of the patent he filed.

The tension between Will and Rick – both of whom I counted as friends – lasted through an unsuccessful patent interference filed by Will, but eventually resolved as Will, ever the gentle soul despite his pride in his invention, graciously decided he was at peace with what had occurred. Until I heard that from Will, I declined to play the XB-40, though it later became my go-to diatonic for several years.

I should mention that although Will was the first to develop the responder reed idea, both Richard Sleigh and Brendan Power developed the same idea sometime around 1990, with none of the three being aware of the work of the others. Brendan’s version later became the Suzuki SUB30.

Brendan had Suzuki build a 30-reed prototype, which I played during a late-night car ride to the airport in Stuttgart at the end of the 1993 World Harmonica Festival in Hohner’s home town of Trossingen, Germany. The harp played very well, and was only slightly larger than a standard 20-reed diatonic. But once word of Rick’s patent was announced, that project went into the deep freeze until the patent expired. It later became the Suzuki SUB30, though Brendan was unhappy with the design compromises made by Suzuki that hampered the effectiveness of the instrument, and Brendan later ended his collaboration with Suzuki.

Every knowledgeable harmonica player who came in contact with Will recognized his profoundly soulful musicianship and visionary thinking, along with his gentle, loving nature. He became a fixture at SPAH conventions through the graces of Joe Filisko hiring him for the teach-in. At that stage Will had become the familiar grizzled, bony elder with the wisp of goatee and the trademark weatherbeaten bowler hat.

I remember that we embraced at the recent 2025 SPAH convention in San Antonio. I had an inkling (perhaps he did, too) that we might not have him with us much longer and, sadly, early this morning as I tossed and turned under the lifelong curse of insomnia, I glanced at my phone to find that his partner, Sharman Gordon, had announced his passing an hour earlier.

Godspeed, Will. We’re the better for having known you.