Living Legend:
Charlie Musselwhite By Eric Steiner
Photo by Ÿ Marilyn Stringer
I first discovered Charlie Musselwhite in the 1970s while working at WGLT at Illinois State University. At the time, I was a work-study undergraduate student earning about $1.30 per hour. I was lucky because I had landed a good job in college radio with a seemingly endless library of long-playing records I could borrow and play in my dorm room. Since then, WGLT affiliated with National Public Radio and has developed award-winning, world-class blues programming that streams 24/7 online. To this day, I still play those early blues records that I found in the WGLT record library, especially Charlie Musselwhite’s seminal 1967 debut on Vanguard Records, Stand Back: Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band. It was simply a delight to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that LP on the air! While this Living Legend portrait may admittedly be more personal than earlier articles in this Blues Festival Guide series, I want to show readers how Charlie Musselwhite’s music has continued to inspire me since those early days as a college radio DJ. Perhaps more importantly, Charlie Musselwhite’s music has taught me the importance of being open to new cultural opportunities, learning from elders who have come before me, and appreciating the rich diversity and potential of blues music. Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Attala County, MS, on January 31, 1944. His father was an itinerant musician who did odd jobs to help his young family, and when Charlie was three, they relocated to Memphis. Charlie’s parents divorced after their move, and then Charlie focused on joining the world of work as soon as he could. While he lived in Memphis, an important cultural touchstone of his life was AM radio. Specifically, Charlie tuned in to WDIA, billed as “Your All-Colored Station” that featured Rufus Thomas’ nightly blues program with a theme
song by African American harmonica ace Sonny Terry, “Hootin’ Blues.” I’d like to think that Sonny Terry drew young Charlie Musselwhite into the blues tribe as an impressionable teenager. Legend has it that Charlie ran moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln with a flathead V-8, and worked as a construction worker around Shelby County and in predominantly African American communities around West Memphis. Often, he was the only White worker on the jobsite. He earned the moniker “Memphis Charlie,” as he learned to play the guitar and harmonica, and discovered early country blues through the work of noted blues scholar Samuel Charters. Local blues elders like Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon and Son Brimmer each mentored Musselwhite in his Memphis blues apprenticeship on guitar and harmonica. Like many of his fellow Mississippi-born bluesmen after World War II, Musselwhite came up from Memphis to the “City of the Big Shoulders” in the early 1960s to seek a higher paying (meaning $3 per hour!) job in a factory. He quickly joined other White bluesmen, including Elvin Bishop, Nick Gravenites, Mike Bloomfield, Harvey Mandel and Paul Butterfield, as they learned from masters like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Williams and Elmore James at fabled blues venues like Magoo’s, Kelley’s and Big John’s. As blues fans, we are all supremely blessed for Muddy Waters’ mentorship of Charlie Musselwhite as a 22-yearold newly arrived bluesman in Chicago. Muddy noticed an uncommon spark in his latest South Side protégé and introduced him to a very rough-and-tumble club scene. During his five-year residency in Chicago, Charlie, like many aspiring bluesmen, gravitated toward Bob Koester’s legendary Jazz Record Mart on Adams Street, where he met blues writer Pete Welding (who later contributed liner notes to his
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