2003 MOBBAY AWARD WINNER
Charlie Musselwhite shouldn’t require much of an introduction. His blues dossier more than speaks for itself. Put simply, he’s played everywhere. From well known showcases like the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco to off-the-beat-and-path locales like the Dead Goat Saloon in Rockland, Maine, you could say that Charlie’s been around. And in all of his travels over the years, Charlie Musselwhite has performed and recorded with an outstanding roster of blues artists like John Hammond, Barry Goldberg, Harvey Mandel, Big Joe Williams, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Mike Bloomfield.
Born in Mississippi, raised in Memphis, and later moving to Chicago, it’s as if Charlie was headed for a blues career from the start. But it was never that preordained. Charlie hadn’t intended on pursuing a musical career. He explains, “I just liked music, and it felt good to play it.” The music career just sort of happened. “I was always interested in music. I just gravitated toward it”
As a teenager Charlie was no doubt influenced by the street singers he used to hear in downtown Memphis. In fact, Charlie says that’s how he learned to play guitar and harmonica. In 1962, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Chicago. As he remembers, “I was just going up there to get a job. I didn’t know about the big blues scene up there.” He found out soon enough. “Everybody was there—Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and Sonny Boy [Williamson] and Little Walter and Big Walter. This was heaven.”
Charlie frequently sat in with many of the Windy City’s blues masters, and in a few short years he became a prominent member of the Chicago blues scene. But by the time of the Sixties, it was a well known fact that the best music opportunities were being found in California. “I kept getting calls from different parts of the country about coming there to play,” Charlie says. So he headed out to the West Coast, and sure enough, in1966, Charlie Musselwhite recorded his first album. In California.
Thirty-eight years and thirty albums later, he’s still going strong. In addition to touring the world, Charlie just released a new album this year titled, Sanctuary. Through all that time, Charlie has managed to keep his music fresh. He’s never settled in on any single style, moving freely from blues to rock, from jazz to Latin, or as he once put it, “any kind of music that has feeling.”
It’s difficult to sum up the career of Charlie Musselwhite if you consider that his career appears to be far from over. In spite of his long list of awards and accomplishments, there’s still lots of music left to be played.
“It’s not the end of the road,” Charlie emphatically declares. “It’s looking back when you’re still in the middle of the stream.”