CHARLIE, ELVIN GOT THE BLUES
Icons team up to celebrate
Charlie Musselwhite has a standard quote he uses to describe his blues-harp playing. It’s even on his Wikipedia page. “I tell people I only know one tune,” says Musselwhite, in an interview from his home in California. “It’s the only tune I’ve ever played. I can change keys with it, or speed it up or slow it down.”
The veteran harmonica player admits it’s just a “comical way of saying I have a style.” Fans would likely object, arguing that it is a touch reductive given Musselwhite’s vast body of work on both his own albums and as a guest for a bewildering variety of musicians. Sure, he plays the blues. But he has played them with everyone from Tom Waits to INXS to Bonnie Raitt, Cyndi Lauper, Ben Harper and Santiago de Cuba icons Cuarteto Patria.
“It’s always been interesting to me how you can add blues to something else and make it better,” says Musselwhite, 73, with a laugh. “And it’s been interesting to me how I can fit in with other kinds of music. That’s how I discovered all this Cuban music. I could tell they were playing from their hearts. Even if you can’t speak the same language, if you’re playing from the heart, you can play together.”
There is certainly no language barrier between Musselwhite and fellow blues icon Elvin Bishop. The two musicians, who will be performing together on Friday at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, live close to each other in California and came to Chicago at roughly the same time in the 1960s. They immersed themselves in the heady blues scene, which meant meeting and eventually playing alongside giants such as Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Williams and Howlin’ Wolf.
Musselwhite came in from Memphis with a healthy reverence for the old masters, but he had no plans to become a professional musician. With the southern economy in a downturn, he came to Chicago hoping to find a job in the factories. In fact, it was a total surprise to him that the Windy City turned out be such a mecca for the music he loved.
“When I was first going to all the clubs in Chicago, I wasn’t asking to sit in or anything like that,” he says. “I was just glad to be there. Coming from Memphis, I already knew how to drink so I fit right in. But this was adult music, there was nobody my age in these clubs, except when somebody like Elvin would wander in. So it was unusual to that crowd and those clubs to see a young white kid in a blues club.”
Musselwhite admits he doesn’t really remember when he first met Bishop in those clubs, saying those years are a bit of blur. But they have been friends for years. He has played harmonica of some of Bishop’s records, but the live show is a fairly recent incarnation that finds the two veteran bluesman trading songs, stories and riffs on stage. They also play a song they wrote together, appropriately titled 100 Years of the Blues.
“Between the two of us, you got 100 years of the blues on the road,” he says.
In fact, it was 50 years ago that Musselwhite released what is now considered one of the seminal recordings in Chicago blues history. Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band was a powerfully raw debut, recorded in a sweaty session on July 11, 1966 that lasted less than three hours. It was released in 1967, but Musselwhite says there was no expectation that it would have such incredible lasting power.
The record company even famously spelled his name wrong in the title.
“It was kind of a lark,” Musselwhite says. “I didn’t know nothing about the music business at all. I was just playing these little clubs, even on the streets for tips, on Maxwell Street I’d play sometimes. I didn’t know if anything would come of this. (Co-producer and music historian) Sam Charters had known me because he had come through Chicago and would talk to me about who was playing where and who he could hear when he was in town. He had heard me playing with Walter Horton, so he put the two of us together in a series called Chicago/The Blues/ Today! It was a three-album series and we did one tune. Then he called up and says ‘Do you want to do a whole album?’ ‘Well, yeah. I’ll do an album. I don’t know. I’m not doing anything else.’”
But the record caught fire and suddenly Musselwhite found himself in high demand beyond Chicago’s city limits. He was a offered a month-long stint in California. He figured he’d play the gigs and come back to Chicago.
“But once I got to California, I saw there was all kinds of work,” he says. “All up the west coast, people loved blues and paid good money. So I stayed.”
Since then, Musselwhite has released dozens of records, from 1969’s steel-guitar and jazz-piano flavoured Tennessee Woman to 2013’s Get Up!, his critically acclaimed collaboration with singersongwriter Ben Harper.
The pair will be releasing a followup to Get Up! next year on a record that has greatly benefited from all the time on the road the two have spent together as part of a band called Relentless 7, Harper’s blues ensemble.
His performances with Bishop, meanwhile, tend to fun and slightly informal affairs. Having fun is the main thrust, he says.
“We talk about people we knew and things that happened and take turns,” he says.
“I play some guitar and I play harmonica and we just make it a lot of fun. The nature of blues in improvisation. I’ll do a tune and Elvin will do one or we’ll do one where we sing together.”
… But this was adult music. There was nobody my age in these clubs, except when somebody like Elvin would wander in.