‘Blues, it’s your buddy when you’re up and comforter when you’re down’

It’s only been a few hours since harmonica veteran Charlie Musselwhite has touched down after a 20-hour-long flight from Los Angeles but the 75-year-old, dressed nattily in black, his silvery mane neatly combed back and his eyes smiling from his cheek, looks not the least bit tired of granting back-to-back interviews at a terrace lounge under an overcast sky on Friday.


This is his first time in India but he’d like you to believe otherwise. “Physically, yes it’s my first time but I’d like to think I’ve been here many times. One of my earliest memories is from when I was nine. I saw an old black and white movie called Pather Panchali. The music, I didn’t know at the time was by Ravi Shankar. It sounded like

blues

to me. So powerful, so moving... I’ve never forgotten. It left a huge impression on my mind. So much from the heart and that’s what I’m all about,” he said while adding. “Then there’s Ali Akbar Khan who had a school in California that I was actually thinking about going to but never get around to it,” he recalled, detailing the three weeks that he intends to spend in India with a visit to Kerala, an Ayurvedic resort and a Ganesha temple.

At this point one can’t help but notice the tattoo on his lower left arm — a smiling Ganesha. “I got this 10 years ago. I heard he removes obstacles. I used to be a bad alcoholic and I’d like to think that he helped remove alcohol from my life,” he smiles. Underneath the elephant god are two foreign letters. “It reads ‘peace’ in Thai.”

A ten-minute chance to quiz a blues veteran —with five decades of experience, 20 albums and multiple awards including a Grammy— seems almost impossible. It helps that Musselwhite shows no haste. He has an air of serenity and a spiritual take on just about everything that probably stems from his Buddhist leaning. Born in Kosciusko, Mississippi in 1944, Musselwhite’s tryst with the blues and the harmonica began as a 13-year-old. “I lived next to a creek with fields around it and workers singing the blues. As the only child of a single mother, that music sounded like how I felt. It wrapped itself around me.” The harmonica that he calls his “voice” didn’t happen by chance. “Back then harmonicas were real cheap. Everybody had one at home. I was 13 when I’d go into the woods or down by the creek and make up my own blues,” laughs the harp genius who began playing in Memphis and gained prominence in Chicago, where he was mentored by many blues musicians. “They were real old singers who I’d drink and have jam sessions with but I didn’t know at the time that I was preparing for a career. I’d have paid more attention then!”

For Musselwhite who has been a recording artiste since the 60s and partnered with the likes of Eric Clapton and BB King, the blues has also been his refuge and a way of dealing with grief after the brutal killing of his mother in 2005. “Blues, it’s your buddy when you’re up and your comforter when you're down,” he says. It also gives him reason to believe in the genre’s future. “As long as people are having their ups and downs, blues is always there for you. It’s not like a big ad campaign. People hear it once and want more. Their hearts recognize the feeling.”

The blues veteran will be on “a spiritual journey” around India when his name appears on the Grammy screen on Monday for his new album with Ben Harper, ‘No Mercy In This Land’. Musselwhite is known to store his nomination medallions at home in a candy bowl that his son had made in art class and the Grammy that he won along with Harper for the Best Blues Album in 2014, locked away in his cupboard. “I don’t know why I do it. I’ve lived in very rough places so it’s just a habit. Maybe I’ll stop now!” he chuckles. And what if he wins? “I may have to get a bigger lock with chains!”

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