How to Play “Baby Peas Don’t Grow” for the Harmonica

Hi everybody welcome to OnlineLessonVideos.com. My name is Sandy Weltman and today we’re going to be working on a real blues classic called “Baby Peas Don’t Grow”. This is going to be my version of it and this video is going to be designed for intermediate to the advance player, levels three through four. We’re going to be using a harmonica in the key of A. If you haven’t printed out your tablature, go ahead and do that and then we’ll go ahead and get started.

Well for our song today, we’re going to use four draw bands. We’re going to use the draw band on hole one. We’re going to use the second draw band on hole two. We’re going to use the first draw band in hole three and we’re going to use the draw band on hole four. So you want to make sure you have those and you have them in tune. Now this song is based on the blue scale in second position. If you could play that cleanly with all the bands, you should have no problem playing the song.

So let’s take a look at it. If you noticed, the actual scales starts on hole two draw and goes up to sixth blow and back down. So practice that a few times. And then if you want you can extend the scale even lower down to the lowest note on harmonica which is the four blow. That means in one blow so you could take it all the way down. So you want to be real familiar with that part of the harmonica playing the blue scale on it, going up and down.

So I would practice that a few times and then we’ll continue on. I'm going to go ahead and play the song again for you real slowly right now. I'm not going to use any appeals like I was using at the very beginning. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the tablature now.