Grammy-Award winning Musselwhite will be bringing his excellent touring band with him for the tour – Kid Andersen on guitar, June Core on drums and Randy Bermudes on bass.
Catch Charlie Musselwhite in Melbourne at Northcote Theatre on Wednesday 18th, Manning Bar, Sydney on Friday 20th, The Tivoli, Brisbane on Saturday 21st, Harmonie German Club, Canberra on Tuesday 24th, Perth’s Astor Theatre on Thursday 26th and The Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide on Saturday September 28.
With nearly six decades of rich musical history behind him, including numerous albums, countless live performances, multiple awards and accolades, there are very few artists of the stature of Charlie Musselwhite.
Mississippi-born, Memphis-raised, Grammy Award-winning music legend Charlie Musselwhite doesn’t just sing and play the blues; he is, in every sense of the word, a bluesman. Growing up, he not only learned the music first-hand from many of the genre’s most influential artists, he also absorbed the lifestyle.
“It’s an attitude,” Musselwhite says of playing the blues. “A way of living life.” Over the course of his six-decade career, Musselwhite has released nearly 40 albums. He is renowned worldwide as a master harmonica player, a seasoned, truth-telling vocalist and an original songwriter rooted deep within the blues tradition. As many of his fans know, he’s also a country blues guitarist of great depth, warmth and subtlety.
Charlie’s journey through the blues was from his birth in Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago and California. Arriving in Chicago in the early sixties, he was just in time for the epochal blues revival. In 1966 at the age of 22 he recorded the landmark Stand Back! to rave reviews. A precipitous relocation to San Francisco in 1967, where his album was being played on underground radio, found him welcomed into the counterculture scene around the Fillmore West as an authentic purveyor of the real deal blues.
Fifty years of nonstop touring, performing and recording have reaped huge rewards. Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age. This man cut his (musical) teeth alongside Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and everyone on the South side of Chicago in the early 1960’s. Thank your lucky stars that he is still with us telling the truth with a voice and harp tone like no other.
More than 36 albums later he is at the top of his game, a revered elder statesman of the blues nowhere near ready to hang up his harps, his depth of expression as a singer and an instrumentalist unexcelled and only growing deeper.
Charlie has been collaborating with the world’s finest artists for many years, including Ben Harper, Cyndi Lauper, Australian bands Noiseworks and INXS, Eddie Vedder, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gov’t Mule, Mickey Hart and Japan’s Kodo Drummers, George Thorogood, Eliades Ochoa, Cat Stevens and personal friend and best man at his wedding 42 years ago, John Lee Hooker.
Musselwhite, more than any other harmonica player of his generation, can rightfully lay claim to inheriting the mantle of many of the great harp players that came before him with music as dark as Mississippi mud and as uplifting as the blue skies of California. In an era when the term legendary gets applied to auto-tuned pop stars, this singular blues harp player, singer, songwriter and guitarist has earned and deserves to be honoured as a true master of American classic vernacular music.
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