Mike, I'm a Hot Shots fan myself. Are you familiar with Captain Stubby and The Boone County Buccaneers I don't have any of their recordings but I do have a late thirties bio rag of both bands and the similiarities between Captain Stubby's and Hezzie's washboard/sound effects units is astounding. They cound be twins. They're so much alike that I wonder which one came first the Captain or the Hezzie version. Captain Stubby (Tom Fouts)was at that time (late thirties) a part of a radio broadcast ensemble doing a show called the Boone County Jamboree on WLW. I gleaned this info from a song folio of favorite songs published by M. M. Cole Publishing Co. of Chicago. All of the songs in it were copyrighted between 1930 and 1941. The Hoosiers info is from an album of songs and photographs published by the Hot Shots in Chicago its copyright is 1938. All of this is such an obscure bit of trivia that it's probably of little use to the world at large here in 1999 but being a washboard/sound effects gizmo player for the last twenty years I find it fascinating that two contemporaries could be performing during the same time frame, in the same geographical location with such amazingly similiar eclectic instruments. Mind you each group was covering a different style of music. The Hot Shots were more pop and jazz and the Buccaneers very much country and hillbilly. Washboards that I've noticed over the years, (and there aren't a lot of us), all seem to have one thing in common and that is that no two are much alike. While I'm sure there are new converts every day still our numbers are few and interest in this sort of thing is not exactly main stream music industry stuff. Now getting to the kazoo, I've been collecting unusual kazoos for years. They've been around for some time. I've managed to unearth some great examples of their evolutionary transformations. Well you gotta collect something, and being a player of such an odd collection of sounds on my Eldorado rhythm board, kazoo seemed to fit right in. My current favorite that I use is a kazoozaphone. A metal bodied kazoo with a Sousaphone shaped metal bell over the resonator chamber. And speaking of Jesse, how many of you are familiar with Robert "Oneman" Johnson? He's a good friend who created a twelve string "foot piano" similiar to Jesse's five string "foot diller". Oneman also uses a hyhat like Jesse. He plays four different types and styles of guitar, (not simultaneously, he's a man after all not an octopus). He does however play guitar, foot piano, hyhat, and a harmonica in a rack, which also serves to hold a kazoo, at the same time, just like Jesse. He is also a wonderful writer, last count about 140 songs. It's been a distinct privilege to have his blessing to perform and record his material which makes up a large part of my song bag. Tampa Red's involvement with kazoo has had definite influence on my friend Jack Cook. Jack is a guitarist and when we play together he enjoys requesting Jesse Fuller tunes of me so he can kazoo along. Jack and I have been mixing it up with another friend Mogen Speiss who plays reeds, (clarinet and sax). Two kazoos and a clarinet isn't something for the timid. It's been great fun. Finally, (I bet you were wondering when I'd run out), there is someone else I thought I should mention concerning this idea of kazoozolgy. This young man is known as Carlton Baltimore, who presently and almost exclusively plays music on the streets of the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. Carlton has got to be one of the foremost exponents of kazooing without actually playing a kazoo. Instead he uses a variety of funnel shaped rolls of paper or even the bottoms of paper cups as resonators and amplifiers of his unique kazoo technique. He is a very powerful player of this eclectic art form and has a beautiful bass range singing voice as well. Okay on to another thread. See you there,

Reggie Miles