Charlie Musselwhite Duo

For 50 years, Charlie Musselwhite has toured, performed, and recorded. He is living proof that great music only gets better with age: he is a 33-time Blues Music Award winner, many-times Living Blues Award winner, 13-time Grammy nominee, 2014 Grammy winner for Get Up with Ben Harper, and 2019 Grammy nominee for No Mercy in this Land, also with Ben Harper. In 2020, he joined with his friend Elvin Bishop and released the Grammy-nominated, Blues Music Award-winning 100 Years of Blues. It debuted at Number One on the Billboard Blues Chart and Downbeat named it the Best Blues Album of the Year. In addition to his own albums, Musselwhite has been featured on recordings by Tom Waits, Eddy Vedder, John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, and Cyndi Lauper. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 2010.

Joining Charlie at The Lyric Theatre is four-time Grammy nominated artist, Bob Welsh. Hailing from Covington, La., Bob moved to the Bay Area in his late teens, where he’s been part of the roots music scene for twenty-five years. He started out in the Rusty Zinn band, and from there has backed up & toured with multiple luminaries all over the world, including Charlie Musselwhite, Kim Wilson, John Nemeth, Mark Hummel, Eric Lindell, Ren Geisick, Aireene Espiritu, Roy Gaines, Snooky Pryor, Pinetop Perkins, Billy Boy Arnold, Lazy Lester, James Harman, James Cotton, Aki Kumar and many others.

Charlie Musselwhite’s story is a classic blues song come to life. Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, he was raised by a single mother who moved the family to Memphis when he was a child. He grew up surrounded by blues, hillbilly, and gospel music that he heard on the radio or from neighborhood musicians. As a teen, he worked as a ditch digger, concrete layer, and moonshine runner. Fascinated by the blues, Charlie Musselwhite began playing the guitar and harmonica. He crossed paths with local musicians including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Johnny Burnette, but the musicians he sought out were veteran Memphis bluesmen like Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Gus Cannon.

In the early 1960s, Charlie Musselwhite moved to Chicago, looking for better-paying work. While driving an exterminator’s truck by day, he hung out in the city’s South Side blues clubs at night. He befriended blues harmonica player Big Walter Horton and became especially close to venerated country bluesman Big Joe Williams. His other friends included blues icons Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin’ Wolf, and he soaked up licks, lyrics, and life lessons whenever he could. Before long, he was sitting in clubs with Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed, building an impressive word-of-mouth reputation. In 1966, at the age of 22, he recorded the landmark Stand Back! to rave reviews. In 1967, he moved to San Francisco, where his album was being played on underground radio. He was welcomed into the counterculture scene around the Fillmore West as someone who played the “real deal” blues.

Now, Musselwhite has released Mississippi Son, an album that takes him full circle, back to Mississippi from all the points in between. It is a compilation of the wisdom and lessons he’s learned through his decades of worldwide touring. “Blues tells the truth in a world that’s full of lies,” he says in “Blues Gave Me a Ride.” Through his evocative vocals, masterful harmonica playing, and note-perfect country blues guitar, Charlie Musselwhite delivers “blues’ honest truth.”

Charlie Musselwhite, more than any other harmonica player of his generation, can rightfully lay claim to inheriting the mantle of the great harp players who came before. 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 honored as a true master of American classic vernacular music. 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 is unparalleled and only growing deeper.

Without American music, there is no Charlie Musselwhite. Without Charlie Musselwhite, American music is the poorer. Hear him play. It’s the blues’ honest truth.