Charlie Musselwhite

“Charlie Musselwhite, with unabashed excellence, sets the standard for blues harmonica.”–Rolling Stone

Charlie Musselwhite’s journey through the blues has taken him from his birthplace in Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago and California. Arriving in Chicago in the early sixties, he was just in time for the epochal blues revival, where he played alongside Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and everyone on the South side of Chicago. In 1966, just 22, he recorded the landmark Stand Back! to rave reviews. A move to San Francisco in 1967 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 later, Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age. Today 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. Thank your lucky stars that he is still with us telling the truth with a voice and harp tone like no other.

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 honored as a true master of American classic vernacular music.

• 2019 Grammy nominee for No Mercy In This Land with Ben Harper
• 2014 Grammy winner for Get Up with Ben Harper
• 13-time Grammy nominee
• 33-time Blues Music Award winner
• Many-time Living Blues Award winner