Harmonica playing hero.

Trenchmouth Taggart.

It’s is rare for the hero of a piece of contemporary historical fiction to be a harmonica player. So it is with the novel ‘The Ballard of Trenchmouth Taggart’ by M. Glenn Taylor.

The eponymous hero rescues the harmonica from a corpse buried underneath the outhouse of the shack where he is raised.

Later in the novel he retreats up into the mountains with his rifle and his Hohner Marine Band harmonica and hides himself away from civilisation until he masters the instrument. Couldn’t help wondering how his reeds lasted over such a prolonged period of practice?

Moses-like, Trenchmouth descends from the mountain as an amazing harp player and hooks up with other musicians and becomes a sensation.

The book is very much an homage to ‘Little Big Man’ and for me was an enjoyable read.