Robert Cooksey

The City of Brotherly Love claims this early blues artist as one of its own, yet birth records for Robert Cooksey are a trifle sketchy. Not so his harmonica style, which was pretty much his own and quite a contrast to the country blues norm. Foregoing the wail of wahs-wahs and the shrieks of overblown high notes, Cooksey cooked up a simple-and-clear folk broth that some critics have identified as the source of Bob Dylan's harmonica technique, while others resent the presence of Dylan's name and the words "harmonica" and "technique" in the same sentence. Clearly, Dylan was insp...