After Cliff Bernier retired, he devoted his time to playing the harmonica and writing poetry. He performs both simultaneously in venues around the country. Photo by Glenda C. Booth

• Share

PRINT

Some people may get a gold watch or pen when they retire. But Clifford Bernier received harmonicas — not one, but two.

When Bernier stepped down after 30 years at the Association for Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, his employer gave him a gold Seydel harmonica and a 16-hole, chromatic Hohner.

They knew him well. Bernier has been playing the harmonica since he was 19 years old. Now retired, he performs all over the country, combining his harmonica music with poetry, which he studied in college.

In his performances Bernier combines his free-verse poetry with harmonica music. For example, he intersperses lines of a poem about rivers with river-like sounds on the harmonica. “All the rivers run to the blues,” he recites and then plays a riff that sounds like rushing water.

“I need to express myself creatively,” Bernier explained in an interview with the Beacon.

At his Fairfax County home, amid several tables covered with some of his 200 harmonicas, Bernier said he cherishes each one for the nuanced sounds he creates from them.

Self-taught in college

Bernier became enamored with the harmonica in 1979, when he was a student at Maine’s Bowdoin College. One evening, he heard a housemate play the harmonica in a bluegrass band and decided he wanted to learn, too.

This was pre-internet and pre-YouTube, and there were no local music classes, so Bernier taught himself to play by listening to his friend. He started imitating the greats: Little Walker, Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Wiliams and Walter Horn.

Harmonicas, also called “mouth harps,” “French harps” and “tin sandwiches,” are featured in blues, jazz, bluegrass, country and folk music.

Over the years he has become a harmonica music historian, tracing the blues’ West African roots through the deep South’s enslaved communities into the 1930s Great Migration and electrification of the music in Chicago, all of which laid the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll, he contends.

The basics: The diatonic harmonica, the most common kind, has 10 holes and plays whole notes. Bernier uses one to play the blues. The chromatic harmonica, which he uses to play jazz, has a slide so musicians can play sharps and flats.

Bernier especially likes to play jazz and regularly performs on Old Town Alexandria’s lower King Street for outdoor diners. Because a harmonica sounds best when it’s warm, he doesn’t play outside if the temperature is below 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Last winter he played indoors at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle. He’s also played at festivals in Florida, North Carolina, Oregon, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana.

In August, Bernier drove to St. Louis for the Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica convention, a gathering of around 500 people from 15 countries — “a meeting of the tribe,” he quipped.

In the meantime, he occasionally drops in at weekly blues jams put on by “Archie’s Barbershop,” the Archie Edwards Blues Heritage Foundation, held every Saturday afternoon in Hyattsville, Maryland. Bernier also joins jams at the Capitol Hill Blues Society.

Bernier has an international audience now, too. He recorded during the pandemic with a Portuguese group called Accumulated Dust. He’s featured on the Post-Colombian America recording, available on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Love of poetry

As Bernier’s music career grew, so did his writing career. He has been writing poems since he was 10 years old. As an English major at Bowdoin, he studied various greats, from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. A few of his favorites are W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Derek Walcott.

In the early 1990s, he frequented poetry slams in the D.C. area, stepping up to the microphone to read his work aloud. He read his poems between jazz sets at the now-closed Alexandria restaurant, Bistro Europa.

He has read at the Library of Congress twice and appeared on “The Poet and the Poem,” a radio interview broadcast by the Library of Congress.

Bernier has published two chapbooks of free-verse poetry titled “Earth Suite” and “Dark Berries.” In 2011, Arlington-based Gival Press published The Silent Art, a collection of 35 of his free-verse poems that explore physics and jazz.

These days Bernier plays blues and spirituals with the Voices of Woodlawn, a mostly Black ensemble of poets who wrote about their experiences visiting the plantation in the context of the estate’s history of slavery. They have performed all over the country and internationally remotely. He also does readings with the Baltimore-based EC Poetry and Prose collective, which published an anthology titled Portraits of Life.

Blending harmonica tunes with poetry is a far cry from Bernier’s career working on medical instrumentation and safety and performance standards for cardiovascular devices, oxygenators and dialysis equipment.

Because Bernier had a full-time job and was raising three sons, it was hard to play or write for around 20 years, he said. But once he retired, he resumed both passions.

“Combining my poetry and my music happened naturally,” Bernier said.

“Poetry has been accompanied by an instrument since ancient times. Music adds emotion to words, and words add meaning to music. It just happens that my instrument is the harmonica — and I love playing.”

Bernier’s next performances are scheduled for March 13 at the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts, Fort Washington, Maryland; March 21, Open Mic reading at the Baltimore County Arts Guild, Catonsville, Maryland; and June 10 at the Blues through Poetry event at the Silver Spring Blues Festival, Silver Spring, Maryland