Charlie Musselwhite Is A Bluesman To The Core. By Brian Wise
Charlie Musselwhite is not only a blues giant he also has to be one of the nicest musicians anywhere on the planet. I know this from personal experience.
When I met the harmonica genius at the San Francisco Blues Festival last September I jokingly remarked that he was ‘truly a man who left his harp in San Francisco.’
It is the sort of witticism that makes my children groan and made Charlie wince. A few people almost saved me by laughing. He retorted quickly ‘you’re a poet but don’t know it.’ Such grace in the face of idiocy!
To be fair I was a bit over-excited at the time. I had just seen Charlie on stage with Allen Toussaint and John Hammond and, while they did individual sets, all three came together for a wonderful finale, detailed in this magazine previously and thrilling to witness.
It occurred to me that all three musicians were at the peak of their form. Toussaint had recorded The River In Reverse with Elvis Costello; Hammond was on a string of four killer albums with Push Comes To Shove being the latest; and, Musselwhite had produced one of his toughest ever albums with Delta Hardware.
Still, Musselwhite certainly hasn’t forgotten his past. He closed his set in San Francisco with the classic ‘Christo Redemptor’ – a song that appeared on his very first album back in 1967.
“Occasionally I’ve tried to quite playing it,” he said of the song when I caught up with him after the set, “but people just demand to hear it. So I just play it and play it. It never gets old. Even for me, it’s always different somehow.”
“We were just having fun,” said Charlie. “When musicians of that calibre get together it’s always interesting. We listen to each other and we play together and it’s just a lot of fun.”
Earlier in the year Charlie had been the big winner at the 28th annual Blues Music Awards (formerly the WC Handys) in Memphis, picking up four of the five categories in which he was nominated, including: Album of the Year (Delta Hardware), Song of the Year (‘Church Is Out’), Traditional Blues Album of the Year and Instrumentalist - Harmonica.
“Sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is about,” he said modestly of his awards. “I appreciate them and I’ll take them.”
When I told Henrietta that I thought Charlie was supposed to be a little more forthright in his own publicity she laughed.
“I’m thankful for what I get,” he added. “If I win, that’s great. If I don’t win, that’s great too. I’m just thankful to be in the game.”
When I reminded him that he scooped the pool and should probably have been dong cartwheels he slyly joked, “I was just doing some earlier.”
“I’ve got a whole lot of ideas,” replied Musselwhite when I mentioned that he and Hammond were producing some of their best work ever. “A lot of irons in the fire.”
It is not the first time I had met Charlie and his wife Henrietta. Some years back I had driven to his home north of San Francisco to interview him and he had taken me to a Mexican restaurant in a little town nearby. It was, he reliably informed me, one of Tom Waits’ favourite eateries. Charlie had just appeared on the Waits album Mule Variations.
“Is Tom likely to turn up?” I asked eagerly. “You never know,” replied Charlie in his charmingly nonchalant way, glancing up from his burrito with a quizzical look. Needless to say, Tom did not show (perhaps he had heard about my awful puns).
Musselwhite’s demeanour is remarkable given that it took him years to overcome his own personal demons and then he lost both his parents in 2005. No doubt the stalwart support of Henrietta has seen him through the hard times. But he has truly known the blues.
Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1944, Musselwhite has never really left the state of his birth, at least spiritually. Though he moved to Memphis at the age of three and then to Chicago in the ‘60s to establish his career, he is the proud owner of the Delta Hardware Company store in Clarksdale, Mississippi – thus the name of his latest album. He plans to refurbish the building with apartments. (The Australian connection does not stop with the fact that the town of his birth is also the name of our highest hill. Musselwhite played on the INXS’s ‘Suicide Blond’).
True to its title, Delta Hardware is a tough album with Musselwhite’s touring band providing the backing - Chris ‘Kid’ Andersen on guitar, Randy Bermudes on bass, and June Core on drums. From the driving ‘Church Is Out,’ to the darker ‘Black Water’ (inspired by Hurricane Katrina), and ‘Clarksdale Boogie’ with its surprisingly contemporary feel and crowd noise sampled from a night at Red’s juke joint in Clarksdale, the music is varied and exciting.
“I’m familiar from that area from way back when I was a kid,” said Musselwhite of Clarksdale and surrounds. “Great people there.”
“But you know,” he quickly appended, “people from Mississippi, wherever they go they are still in Mississippi.”
“I’m there right now!” he said with a chuckle.
“You can feel the blues just coming right up out of the ground,” he recalled, “it’s in the air, it’s in the food, it’s in the way people walk and talk. It’s just soaked in blues. Up in the clouds there’s blues.”
“We still go there every chance we get,” he added. Delta Hardware is available on Real World. Charlie Musselwhite plays Byron Bluesfest, Pt Nepean Festival…. And joins John Hammond at Melbourne’s Prince Of Wales on March 19 and Sydney’s The Basement on March 20.