.A Sort of Homecoming: Blues-great Charlie Musselwhite returns with new collection since leaving California

In an age where performers make their names as Instagram influencers and TikTok flavors-of-the month, Charlie Musselwhite is the equivalent of a landline—steady, reliable and a link to the past. Born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, the septuagenarian musician’s career dates back to his 1967 debut Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band being a blues standard-bearer. It’s a journey that continues on the recently released Mississippi Son, a stripped-down collection of 14 songs featuring the harmonica player singing and picking up a guitar to present a mix of originals and nuggets originally recorded by an array of storied names including Yank Rachell, the Stanley Brothers and Charley Patton.

It’s Musselwhite’s first solo outing since moving back to Clarksdale, Miss., about a year-and-a-half ago from the tiny Northern California community of Geyserville—he released 100 Years of the Blues with old friend Elvin Bishop back in 2020. Climate change was the impetus behind the harp player and his wife/manager Henrietta Musselwhite pulling up stakes and moving back to the Delta.

“This is where I’m from, and I had a home here,” he said. “We were having fires every year. The last time, we could see it coming. If the wind hadn’t changed, we might have gotten burned out. We figured it was inevitable that we would at some point, so why wait for that? It was really horrible. You have to be evacuated, and everything in the freezer was rotten because the electricity was turned off. It was horrible. I remember walking out my front door, and the ash was just falling like snow. It ain’t gonna go away. It’s going to get worse.”

With the pandemic forcing Musselwhite to stay in one place—“I’ve been on the road for over 50 years, so it was a nice break for me. I didn’t miss my suitcase at all”—he started hanging out at friend Gary Vincent’s nearby studio, noodling around on guitar. Before long, Vincent was hitting the record button, drummer Ricky Martin and upright bassist Barry Bays were recruited, and Mississipi Son was the result.

“We started recording some of these tunes that I’d been doing for a long time, and at some point we realized that it could be an album,” Musselwhite said. “It was kind of an accident. Then we invited [Martin and Bays] to play on a few tunes. It just evolved on its own and took on its own momentum.” 

The slow-as-molasses tempo on the album is languid and made all the more so by Musselwhite’s laconic vocal phrasing, which is goosed along by his equally loose strumming and harp-blowing. The record doesn’t so much rock out as much as it oozes along from the self-penned opener “Blues Up the River” and couplets like “I’ll drink muddy water until I’ve had enough,” which brings to mind images of the mighty Mississippi. The reading of Guy Clark’s “The Dark” has a stark tempo that is reminiscent of Musselwhite’s old friend and mentor John Lee Hooker, who is immortalized by a version of “Crawling King Snake” that is perfectly arranged as a loose shuffle. There’s even an original instrumental called “Remembering Big Joe,” an homage to Musselwhite’s late friend Big Joe Williams, that brings to mind visions of noodling away on the porch of a shotgun shack in the Deep South. Fans can expect this and more now that the 78-year-old will be back out on the road fronting a guitar, bass and drums trio.

“I do some tunes that people request, and I have some new songs they haven’t heard before,” he said. “I might even play guitar—who knows? It depends on the situation and how much time I have. A lot of people don’t even know that I play guitar, so that’s a departure. I didn’t even know how people would react to [my playing on Mississippi Son], but it’s just been overwhelming. People are just loving it. I’m happily surprised—it’s a nice thing.”

Musselwhite’s love of the blues can be traced to a childhood spent listening to music sung by local laborers out in the countryside.

“I remember as a little kid we lived on a street and then there was woods and in it there was a creek,” he said. “On the other side of the creek, there were fields where people would work in them. Down on the shady side of the creek was the coolest place I could find. I remember as a little kid, laying on the shady side of the creek, cooling off and listening to people singing work songs in the field. And that was blues. I remember listening to those songs, and while I liked a lot of different kinds of music, this music sounded like how I felt. It really pulled me into it.”

After his folks split, Musselwhite and his mom moved to Memphis in the early ’50s, where neighbors included rockabilly brothers Dorsey and Johnny Burnette and exposure to hillbilly, gospel and country music along with the emerging genre of rock and roll. The blues proved to be the impetus for Musselwhite, who started playing harmonica as a child, to seek out local mentors like Furry Lewis, Will Shade and Gus Cannon. And while the teen scared up money by working at various times as a ditch digger, concrete runner and moonshine runner, Musselwhite took that money to local record shops where he did a fair amount of crate-diving for anything blues-related and beyond.

“I remember going around Memphis looking for old blues records in junk stores,” Musselwhite said. “I found the first Sonny Boy [Williamson] record and other players. I really liked the way the harmonica sounded. At some point, I remember thinking that since I had my own harmonica, I decided to start playing my own [music]. I started going out into the woods where I thought nobody could hear me play and just experimented. I was already familiar with it. I just started playing my own blues and making it up.”

Musselwhite hopped Route 51—aka the “Hillbilly Highway”—up to Chicago in search of better-paying jobs and quickly dove into the local music scene. It was here that he began running in the same circles as Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter Jacobs. Big Walter Horton was a constant running buddy that Musselwhite roamed the streets with, often dropping into clubs to pick up licks, check out gigs and sit in with many of the aforementioned blues icons.

Far from being a blues purist, Musselwhite’s musical curiosity has made for some odd creative bedfellows. One of the more unusual collaborations was with INXS, who tapped him to play the harmonica solo on the 1990 INXS hit “Suicide Blonde” during a tour Down Under. “I got a phone call in my hotel room, and [the guys in the band] said they knew I was coming to Sydney and wanted to know if I’d like to come down to the studio and record with them. I said sure, ’cause I had a day off. I went down there and recorded with them. I remember asking someone who INXS was and the response I got was, ‘You never heard of them? They only sold 15 million records last year.’ They were really nice guys. We had a good time.”

Musselwhite was also tapped to play on Cyndi Lauper’s 2010 outing Memphis Blues, which found him touring with the Queens native, an experience he gives high marks to. “It was really a wonderful time being on the road with her,” he said. “Her audience didn’t have a clue as to who I was. She made a point of them knowing who I was. She would point to me to take a solo, but the spotlight would stay on her. The audience would look at her while I was soloing. After that, she would stand behind me so that the spotlight had to be on me. I can’t say enough good things about her. She’s a really fabulous human being and a great musician who really knows music. She has a lot of compassion and does a lot to help people. At the same time, she’s tough as nails. You do not want to cross that woman. We got along great. She’s a good friend, and I’m really glad to know her.”

This musical wonderment has occasionally bled into Musselwhite’s own work, most notably on 1999’s Continental Drifter, a project that found him throwing Tex-Mex into the mix in addition to joining forces with Cuba’s Cuarteto Patria. At other times, he’s jammed with Brazilian forró musicians, despite them only speaking Portuguese. He traces that creative curiosity back to his days of seeking sounds growing up in Memphis.

“Ever since I was a kid in Memphis, going around looking for blues records and ’78s, anything else that looked interesting I’d get that, too,” he said. “They were only a nickel or a dime. I discovered a lot of music that I ordinarily wouldn’t have heard, because you wouldn’t hear it on the radio. Stuff like Greek, Indian and flamenco music. I was able to expose myself to music from other cultures at an early age. Even though it wasn’t blues, I could tell it had a spirit to it that was similar to blues. When you listen to flamenco, man, it sure enough sounds like blues in a way. I came to the conclusion that all around the world, every culture has this music of lament. There’s a guy on the corner singing about how his baby left him in every corner of the world. That’s music from the heart. I discovered that you can play with anybody that plays from the heart, even if you can’t speak the same language.”

Photo by Rory Doyle 

 

Charlie Musselwhite’s Fave Harp Players 

By Dave Gil de Rubio 

A living and breathing musical treasure, Charlie Musselwhite is a direct link to artists who can easily find themselves on the Mount Rushmore of Blues—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker; the latter was even Musselwhite’s best man at his 1981 wedding, complete with Hell’s Angels. As someone who spent a lot of time bouncing around Chicago’s South Side in the company of storied bluesmen such as Big Joe Williams and jamming with all stripe of musician ranging from the aforementioned names to folks including Sonny Boy Williamson and Lew Soloff, the Mississippi native has a triumvirate of harp-blowers who really set the tone for his own musical development. Read his reminiscences below.

Will Shade Jr. (Feb. 5, 1898 to Sept. 18, 1966)

“My first experience with a harmonica player was Will Shade. He told me his mother taught him how to play harmonica, and he had this jug band all back in the ’20s and ’30s. This is going way back. He played guitar and harmonica and was the leader of the Memphis Jug Band. Then later, in Chicago, he taught Walter Horton, who was also known as Big Walter.”

Big Walter Horton (April 6, 1921 to Dec. 8, 1981)

“Big Walter was from Mississippi, but he grew up in Memphis and learned from Will Shade just like I did. So when I got to Chicago and got to know Walter Horton or Big Walter or Shakey—I called him Shakey—I learned a lot from hanging around him. We were hanging around a club called Rose and Kelly’s. I played there all the time, and there were a lot of harmonica players that played there. It was like a harmonica-player hangout—Good Rockin’ Charles, Terry Bell and a bunch of other guys. We’d all take turns playing, and then Walter would just wipe the floor with us. You can’t watch a harmonica player and see what he’s doing the way you can watch a guitar player or a piano player. Just by listening, I soaked it up. He was a huge influence on me, especially since I knew the same guy he learned from.”

Little Walter (May 1, 1930 to Feb. 15, 1968)

“He became a friend, and I hung out with him a lot. He let me sit in with him, and I learned from him, too. I was just soaking it up. He seemed to really incorporate horn lines more. He was younger than Big Walter and sort of straddled the Chicago sound with the Memphis country-blues sound. There was Will Shade then Big Walter and then Little Walter. It was a natural progression.”

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