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| Edited By: Dyuti Basu |Source: DNA |Updated: Feb 10, 2019, 06:15 AM IST
As a child Charlie Musselwhite grew up listening to the swing records his mother played at home and fiddling with the guitar his father got him for his 13th birthday. This might have been the case with many a children growing up in ’40s and ’50s Memphis, Tennessee. And like most living in Memphis through the ’50s and ’60s, Musselwhite swayed to the blues. However, unlike his peers, this harmonica-whiz with a voice like melted butter would go on to become one of the blues legends of his time and perform with other greats, such as Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Little Walter.
Looking back over the evolving music scene over the years, Musselwhite muses that a number of additions and experimentations have found their way into the pure “real” blues over the decades. “When I started out, blues was strictly real blues. What passes for blues today would never have been called blues then. Now people play rock and call it blues or blues/rock, which is just watered down blues. I prefer the real deal,” he begins, adding that the sound of the delta and of Memphis is unique in its own right. “They say the Mississippi delta ends in Memphis. It’s true that many Mississippi delta musicians passed through or lived in Memphis and they left their mark on the local, blues scene.”
It was in ’66 that Musselwhite partnered with Vanguard Records to bring out his first major record Stand Back! Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite’s Southside Band, which “put me on the road and gave me a career.” Now, at the other side of nearly 40 albums, the artiste muses, “Well, for one thing, I never stopped learning and I’m still learning. I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner.”
Somewhere between the two, Musselwhite moved from Memphis to San Francisco, where he was hailed as the king of blues in the counterculture of the era, among rock and roll and flower children. It was their open and accepting ways that the artiste remembers most now, especially as he was one of the only blues artistes in the area, as opposed to Memphis where he had been one of many trying to make a mark.
Encouragement also came from his fellow musicians, recalls the harmonica maestro, and he admits that he can’t pinpoint any one collaboration that stood out over the rest. There were too many to count, he says, and lists, “The way all the Chicago guys like Muddy, Wolf, Little Walter, Robert Nighthawk and many others accepted, encouraged, pushed and hired me for gigs was a great honour. BB invited me to open for him on two tours. They showed how they believed in me and so I couldn’t let them down.”
The path of any musician is often riddled with challenges, and life on the circuit led to Musselwhite developing an alcohol addiction. It was the traumatic experience of a young girl that finally pulled him out of it. In 1987, Jessica McClure Morales, now a television actor, fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas. She was only 18 months old at the time. “Her brevery [in waiting patiently for the rescue] moved me to quit drinking and after I got sober everything in my life got better, especially my music. I got more focused,” muses the musician.
Today, while Musselwhite is touted for his prowess as a singer and a blues musician, it’s when he opens his suitcase, which holds his harmonica, that he gets the loudest cheers and standing ovations. But when asked how he turns the simple instrument into an art form, the artist replies cheekily, “That’s a mystery, isn’t it? It’s the only instrument that doesn’t use the hands somehow. So you can’t see what you’re doing and no one else either.”
