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Contents:

A Word from the Executive Director
JANET GOHRING
GUILD NEWS - NAJHF 2005 UPDATE

eBoing: Plucking the Web for Rare Finds
by Gordon Frazier

Allan J. Delay: 1923-2005

A Happy Harp is a Dry Harp
Mark D. Poss
CARE FOR YOUR HARPS

Bulletin Board: Post Your Notes
Norway - Thailand - Kansas City - RVing - More

Online Newsletter Archive
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2005 North American Jew’s Harp Festival update

The 13th annual North American Jew’s Harp Festival will be held August 5–6, 2005 at the Bay City Arts Center in Bay City, Oregon, on the Oregon coast just north of Tillamook.

That same weekend, Bay City’s “Pearl of the Bay” festival will take place. Its main focus will be volkssports (hiking, mountain biking, kayaking), but will also feature food and crafts booths.

A nearby city park will be available for campers. The Guild has reserved a number of spaces for festival goers on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Bay City Arts Center will once again provide meals at affordable prices.

A meeting of the Jew’s Harp Guild will be held Sunday morning after the festival. The public is welcome and encouraged to attend these meetings.

If you wish to perform or give a workshop at the festival, or have other questions, contact the Guild at:

69954 Hidden Valley Lane, Cove, OR, 97428 USA; Ph: (541) 568-4045;    E-mail: plucknpost@yahoo.com ?

Tentative Schedule

(Mealtimes are estimated.)

FRI      4 pm   Kickoff ceremony; workshop
                        and band scramble signups.

            5:30 pm          Dinner

            9 pm   Friday Night Dance

SAT    9:30 am           Brunch

            11 am Workshops

            1 pm   “Twang Time” Sharing Circle

            3 pm   Showing of Collections

            6 pm   Dinner

            7 pm   Feature Concert / Grand Jam

SUN    Noon    Jew’s Harp Guild Meeting

THROUGHOUT: Instrument and merchandise sales, children’s activities, displays, reading room, and plenty of informal jamming.

In the early 1980s, I searched for a replacement for my (sigh) broken J.R. Smith Jew’s harp by sending out hundreds of letters to music stores all over the country.  No more than a dozen responded, and all of them carried a few common versions—but no Smiths. It took months. Recently a search of eBay brought up 54 Jew’s harp listings from all over the world. It took five minutes. A J.R. Smith was among them; I am now its happy owner.

While there are instruments on eBay one should never buy (see sidebar, page 6) there are also old Smiths, rare antiques, delightful oddities, and a few surprises. Some recent listings are shown below.

With some exceptions, eBay is not a good place to buy new instruments. It’s best to buy them from the maker, if possible, or find a good reseller. Some of both are listed at the end of this article.

But for those seeking unique or vintage Jew’s harps, eBay—”the nation’s garage sale”—has become the best place to find them.

Following are some tips on how to get started, and suggestions on how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

eBay 101

First, you need access to the Internet. If you don’t have it at home, visit your public library—most of them offer patrons the use of a computer with Internet access, and many offer training for those unfamiliar with computers or the Internet. Public libraries, you gotta love ’em.

You also need an e-mail address. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for free web-based e-mail. “Web-based” means you can access your e-mail account from any computer with an Internet connection. Pluck-N-Post uses Yahoo! e-mail (http://www.yahoo.com) because of its consistently high ratings, but lots of other companies offer this service. CNET (www.cnet.com) has a pretty good chart of comparative listings, if you want to shop around.

How can companies afford to offer e-mail for free? It’s paid for with ads: Whenever you e-mail someone an ad is attached to the bottom of your message. If you find that annoying, you can sign up for a “premium” service without ads, but that comes with a fee.

Once you have an e-mail account, visit the eBay website (http://www.ebay.com). Click on “register” at the top of the screen and follow the directions.

Now you are ready to search the site. Click on Buy at the top of the screen. A window will open with the search screen shown below.

Be sure “All Categories” appears in the right-hand box, as Jew’s harps are listed in Musical Instruments, Toys, Antiques, Collectibles, and other categories.

In the left-hand box, type the word or words you want to search for. Try this:

(jaw,jaws,jaw’s,jew,jews,jew’s,juice,mouth) + harp

with commas but no spaces between the words in the parentheses, and a space before and after the plus sign.

This search will find most of the English variants. Other names such as trump and gewgaw occasionally show up on eBay, but to find them you will need to create separate searches. (Note: If you search for trump, be sure to change “All Categories” to “Musical Instruments.” For gewgaw you are safe searching All Categories.)

You might also want to create a search for common non-English names such as khomus, morsing,  guimbarde, maultrommel, genggong, or kubing.

Once you have entered the word or words you want to search for, click the gray Search button at the right and you will get a list of the current offerings on eBay that match your criteria.

More search tips

Here is a great tip: Once you have clicked on Search, scroll to the bottom of the screen. You will find an easy-to-miss link that says “See all items including those available from non-English speaking countries.” Oh my gosh. Click on that link. A plethora of exotica will fill your screen.

To save your search criteria, find the underlined words “Add to Favorites” in the upper right part of the screen. Click on it. Now the next time you log on to eBay, instead of choosing Buy you can choose My eBay, click on Searches in the left-hand column of that screen, and select the saved search you want to use.

If you are looking for recordings with Jew’s harp, select the box next to “Search title and description” below the search contents box. All recordings with Jew’s harp mentioned anywhere in the liner notes will appear. Gee, there’s a lot of them!

Bidding

So you have found something you simply can’t live without. You may want to bid on it. The instructions on eBay are straightforward. In a nutshell: these are timed auctions with an opening bid amount. Throughout the auction (they last for days) you can check to see when the auction ends, how many bids have been placed, and if you are the highest bidder.

Be sure to check shipping charges. Sellers are allowed to set these charges themselves, so if an item is priced at a surprisingly low opening bid, it may be due to a little padding in the shipping charges.

Boinger Beware

All of the sellers on eBay I’ve dealt with have been honest folk. But that does not make them Jew’s harp experts, so watch out for “modern antiquities.”

For instance, be skeptical of instruments described as “Civil War era.” Some of them might be, but others are of more recent vintage. Perhaps they were found near a battleground site and assumed to be that old.

There are also occasional listings of even older Jew’s harps. One recent “Colonial era” listing probably was from that era. It was from an archaeological dig, was heavily corroded, and had no tongue. However, others described as such are 50 years old, at most.

Again, these are probably honest mistakes. Part of the confusion undoubtedly stems from modern “souvenirs” that are knock-offs of older designs.

Here are some clues that might help you gauge the authenticity of older metal instruments:

•     Older Jew’s harps usually have uncoated frames; knockoffs often have a shiny lacquer finish.

•     Old handmade ones usually have tool marks on the crimp and the wide part of the tongue, whereas the knockoff will have none of those marks.

•     Note the width of the tongue. It tapers on handmade instruments, but not on the knockoffs.

•     Look at the gap between tongue and frame, which must be very small to produce a tone. Knockoffs have a huge gap  and produce no tone at all; they were never meant to be played.

Buying new instruments

This article has focused on rare and antique Jew’s harps, because if you are looking on the Internet for a new instrument there are much better options than eBay. Here are two reseller’s sites you will enjoy:

http://www.mouthmusic.com

http://www.danmoi.de

Here are a few makers with on-line presence, if you’d prefer to buy from them directly. (Be sure to ask Mr. Szilágyi for a copy of his catalog; it will amaze you.)

Bailey  http://www.claytonbailey.com

Gohring  http://www.billgohring.com

Hörzing  http://www.maultrommel-jofen.at

Szilágyi  http://www.szilagyi-jewsharp.com

Wimmer  http://www.maultrommel.at [in German]

Finally, an extensive list of makers throughout the world, along with knowledgeable reviews of many of their instruments, can be found on the well-done Dutch website:

http://www.antropodium.nl

Happy surfing!  n

Tsk

Often sighted on eBay (and elsewhere) are Jew’s harps that are not functional as musical instruments. Two examples are the Schylling Jaw Harp and the model made by Trophy Music Company (variously marketed as 1st Note, Blue Grass Jaw Harp, and Snoopy’s Harp*). Especially heinous are the ones aimed at children such as 1st Note; giving an unplayable “instrument” to a child is just wrong. If you want to give a young child a jaw harp, try a bamboo version like a kubing or giwong. They are easy to play and are played against the lips, sparing the baby teeth. If you want to get a metal Jew’s harp for an older child, get them a decent one they can make music with. The Whitlow Jaw Harp, available in many music stores, is a good choice; the inexpensive Austrian ones made by Schwarz or Wimmer are also fine for beginners.

*A caveat: Older Snoopy Harps are a different matter. The late Tom Bilyeu of Molalla, Oregon, was a great promoter of the Jew’s harp, and originally made an instrument marketed as Mr. Jew’s Harp. At some point he acquired the rights to use the Snoopy name and image, so started selling his instrument under that name. These were perfectly playable Jew’s harps. (More recently a comparable instrument has been marketed under the name Great American Jaw Harp.) Eventually, though, Tom sold the rights to the Snoopy name to Trophy Music Co., while continuing to sell his instrument under his own name. Trophy then applied the Snoopy name to the doo-daw noted above. Hence the confusion of players who fondly recall the old Snoopy Harp. But don’t be fooled—it literally ain’t what it used to be.

A Correction

In “A Jew’s Harp Travelogue,” PNP Vol 9, Issue 3 the 1998 Molln congress was referred to as the Second International Trump Congress. Molln was the third congress (after Iowa in 1984 and Yakutsk in 1991).

Check out the review by National Public Radio’s Marika Partridge of John Palme’s latest CD, Mouthbow: Small Voices. The review, with sound samples, is at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4534703