I can’t name a better living practitioner of blues harmonica than Charlie Musselwhite. Born in 1944 in Kosciusko, Mississippi, he moved to Memphis with his family in the late 40s, then came to Chicago in 1962 looking for a job. He got sucked in by the city’s thriving modern blues scene instead, and by the mid-60s he was leading his own band. In 1967 Musselwhite released his first album, Stand Back!, on Vanguard, and though he’d relocate to San Francisco within a few years, he never abandoned the music of Chicago and the Mississippi Delta. He’s made more than two dozen albums since then, amassing a discography that demonstrates a profound musical curiosity—his collaborators include the Blind Boys of Alabama, Cuban guaracha master Eliades Ochoa, and Tom Waits. His latest album is 2010’s The Well (Alligator). For this week’s Artist on Artist, Musselwhite is interviewed by Rockin’ Johnny Burgin, a Chicago guitarist 25 years his junior. Burgin made a big splash locally in the 90s, leading a band that revisited the classic, stripped-down sound of 60s blues. For most of the aughts he had little to do with music, focusing on working and raising a family, but now he’s back on the scene with a new album, Grim Reaper, his return to the Delmark label after more than a decade. Johnny Burgin plays a Chicago Blues Festival afterparty at Reggie’s Music Joint on Sat 6/9 and joins Mary Lane at the festival for her Crossroads Stage set on Sun 6/10. Charlie Musselwhite plays at SPACE in Evanston on Thu 6/7. —Peter Margasak
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To me, this CD [The Well] seems like a culmination of a really stellar career. It’s a really personal record. I think every song on there is excellent. Tell me a little bit about how The Well came to be as a collection. There’s what I call a producer’s project. Chris Goldsmith was the producer, and I’ve worked with him on lots of things in the past. And he’s always real good at getting the best out of me, which is the job of a producer. And it was his idea that I write out all the tunes. He knew that I had a lot of tunes that were in different stages of being written, and he pushed me to finish them all and get them done. And so that’s what happened. And everything—you marked it as personal—well, everything that I write about is something that I know about. I can’t write about something that I don’t know about and really feel comfortable with it. So it’s all about what I know, and that’s what makes it personal.
Let me say this. When I was a kid growing up in Memphis, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew that I wanted to roam and ramble. I wanted to see the world. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I didn’t have any clue that anything in Chicago other than a factory job was waiting for me there. The south was so economically depressed back then, and I had been doing construction work and hard labor. It just didn’t suit me. . . . And I wanted to get up there and get one of those good factory jobs, and that was all I there for.
But I still love Chicago. I really do. I miss it a lot.
