Playlist with the tunes in the "Blues Harmonica Collection" book

In the book, the cover of "I'm a man" it references is attributed to Lester Davenport, but I was unable to find such one. So I replaced a Lester with another Lester, since Lazy Lester's cover is a nice one. Given that I couldn't find the Lester Davenport cover, I'm not even sure whether the book has a mistake and in fact is referring to Lazy Lester's version instead.

I have not tried checking the harmonica parts to see whether they match or not, but for listening to it this one works for me :)

To be fair, I've not used the book too much. Making the playlist was a first step into maybe giving it more love and, of course, for listening to the songs. I think in the right hands this might be a good book, I'm just not sure mine are those hands :)

Since I've not used it much, my opinion might change over time, but I basically agree to what I read about the book in the Amazon reviews of it: This essentially is a songbook for the intermediate/advanced player both in technique and in knowledge of the blues. I'd say the book is well beyond my current playing level, which probably biases my opinion. Like other reviewers in Amazon, I feel the book is a trampoline to coming up with your own cover of the tunes, based on the book, the recordings and your own skills. This is key: the whole purpose of this book is you sit down with it and play along to the recording so you learn the tune by yourself.

The transcriptions are somewhat basic, so you need to be able to identify the techniques that are missing from them by hearing recordings, which means you must be familiar with those and be able not only to play but to identify them as you hear them. That's one of the reason why you need to have achieved an intermediate level of playing to be able to benefit from the book. If you compare those to transcriptions from David, you see that David's (both those for bluesharmonica.com and others he's published in his books) are much more detailed than those on this book, so they are friendlier to the beginner player and probably more useful to any player.

The book contains very few facts about technique, players or songs. Which reinforces the idea that this book does not try to teach you how to play or anything else about blues harmonica. This is just a book to learn these iconic tunes (solos and some fills/self-comping riffs) once you have good command of the harmonica. 

I'll try to dissect the book parts and what I like or not from the book.

At the beginning there's a short introduction (1 page) with a paragraph about when amplified harmonica playing was born and some facts (a couple of paragraphs) about each of the best known players covered: Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin Wolf (just one paragraph about him) and Jimmy Reed. It includes a short introduction about them and a little bit about their style of play (I'll summarize a example one: Jimmy Reed played primarly 1st position simple solos with short hook-based riffs on a rack mounted harp). All well known facts, nothing new here.

Then there's the table of contents with two song indexes, alphabetical and by artist, but none of them includes the song position, which hoever is noted on each score. So if you are looking for a song on a specific position (say, you're training 1st or 3d position) you need to either know it by heart or browse through the scores to find one.

Then there's two pages on how to read the tabs, including the typical diagram of a 10-hole Richter-tuned diatonic harp. Technique-wise, both score and tablature include single notes, double stops, intervals (at least octaves, not sure if other splits too), some chording (in a couple of songs), grace notes (these only in the score), shakes, glissandos and hand wah. Some effects are shortly explained, others (like the slide/glissando) just mentioned by name. The tabs include bends, of course. No mention of slaps, pulls or flutters, so you need to figure out these by yourself from the recordings.

Finally, each music score, I'm not exactly clear in which order. Certainly not alphabetical, not by artist either. I don't think it's by date of the recording either. Semi-alphabetical if anything. A bit confusing. Each score includes harmonica and sung parts (also pitch for the sung sections), chords, and harmonica tablature. The scores are not transposed to the key of G, which I guess it can be argued both ways as a good or bad thing. I'm certainly used to reading everything in the key of G and letting the harmonica transpose (though to be fair I generally use tabs more than the score, so this doesn't really matter that much to me), but if your goal is to get better at sight reading I assume actual (non-transposed) notation might be a better tool. My main interest right now is improving my playing, not sight reading, so this makes the book's scores a bit less useful to me. Anyway, tabs are OK. There is no special guidance or tips on how to play any of the songs beyond the tabs.

Each song score includes the names of the authors, and the harmonica key and position (one of "straight harp", "cross harp" or "dorian mode (third position)" as it was played on the transcribed recording, so you know how what harp to use if you're playing along. It's confusing that it doesn't include name of the performer. So you see that Boom Boom Out Go The Lights was written by Stan Lewis, but it doesn't specify (on that page) that the transcribed cover is Little Walter's. There's no mention anywhere in the book of what year the song was recorded or any other facts about it.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone mainly learning technique. But if your goal is to play a collection of really good and well known songs and be able to get as close as you can to these recordings within your skill level, this can be a good way to start. I generally prefer to learn songs by ear or look up some tutorials on YouTube (which generally give you more tips on playing, not just which holes to blow or draw through), though of course that only gets you so far. This book seems like a good starting point to jumpstart your own version of the tunes, maybe as a guide when jamming with others, but I found it will only be as useful as your current skill level lets you. You won't be able to sound like Little Walter by just reading the book =)