Hammie Nixon (January 22, 1908 – August 17, 1984)
was an American harmonica player.
Life and career
Born Hammie Nickerson in
Brownsville, Tennessee
Brownsville is a city in and the county seat of Haywood County, Tennessee, United States, located in the western Its population as of the 2010 census was 10,292, with a decrease to 9,788 at the 2020 census. The city is named after General Jacob J ...
,
he began his music career with
jug band
A jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of conventional and homemade instruments. These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepi ...
s in the 1920s. He is best known as a
country blues
Country blues (also folk blues, rural blues, backwoods blues, or downhome blues) is one of the earliest forms of blues music. The mainly solo vocal with acoustic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment developed in the rural Southern United States in t ...
harmonica player, but he also played the
kazoo
The kazoo is an American musical instrument that adds a "buzzing" timbral quality to a player's voice when the player vocalizes into it. It is a type of '' mirliton'' (which itself is a membranophone), one of a class of instruments which modifie ...
, guitar and jug. He played with the guitarist
Sleepy John Estes
John Adam Estes (January 25, 1899 or 1900June 5, 1977),
for half a century, first
recording
A record, recording or records may refer to:
An item or collection of data Computing
* Record (computer science), a data structure
** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity
** Boot sector or boot record, r ...
with Estes in 1929 for
Victor Records
The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American recording company and phonograph manufacturer that operated independently from 1901 until 1929, when it was acquired by the Radio Corporation of America and subsequently operated as a subsidi ...
.
He also recorded with
Little Buddy Doyle, Lee Green, Clayton T. Driver, Charlie Pickett and
Son Bonds.
During the 1920s Nixon helped to pioneer the use of the harmonica as a rhythm instrument in a band setting, rather than as a novelty solo
instrument. After Estes died in 1979, Nixon played with the Beale Street Jug Band (also called the
Memphis Jug Band). Nixon's last recording, "Tappin' That Thing" (Hmg Records), was recorded shortly before his death in 1984, in
Jackson
Jackson may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Jackson (name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the surname or given name
Places
Australia
* Jackson, Queensland, a town in the Maranoa Region
* Jackson North, Qu ...
, Tennessee.
See also
*
Blues harp
The Richter-tuned harmonica, or 10-hole harmonica (in Asia) or blues harp (in America), is the most widely known type of harmonica. It is a variety of diatonic harmonica, with ten holes which offer the player 19 notes (10 holes times a draw and ...
*
List of harmonica blues musicians
*
List of harmonicists
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nixon, Hammie
1908 births
1984 deaths
People from Brownsville, Tennessee
American blues harmonica players
Country blues musicians
Harmonica blues musicians
Musicians from Tennessee
20th-century American musicians