Mississippi Son

Album review

Though slowly becoming a museum piece—and sadly the province of weekend garage bands—the real blues aren't going away without a fight.  Now that the Delta originators and second generation Chicagans are nearly all gone, players with the vital experience to make the music ring authentic may be rarer, but we've still got Charlie Musselwhite.  A onetime moonshine runner and basement resident of  Chicago's Jazz Record Mart, the Memphis native—now nearing 80—delivers a varied, mostly bare bones set of acoustic blues split between solo performances and those with accompaniment by drummer Rickey "Quicksand" Martin and standup bassist Barry Bays.  Fresh off a pair of much-praised collaboration albums with Ben Harper and Elvin Bishop respectively, Mississippi Son has the extra pedigree of having been recorded in Clarksdale, MS (home of the Delta Blues Museum) and being released on Chicago-based and bluescentric Alligator Records. Early blues from the Mississippi Delta, one of a young Musselwhite's first loves, is heard in a cover of Charley Patton's "Pea Vine Blues." He proves his own Delta chops in "Stingaree," which revisits the eternal blues metaphor of women as bees, singing "Man needs honey/ Gets it when he could/ Sting and always/ Feels so good." Another early blues number, "Crawling King Snake," written by Musselwhite's onetime roommate Big Joe Williams but made famous by John Lee Hooker, gets a fine moody treatment that showcases his playing on acoustic guitar, an instrument that he's learned over time and that has steadily become a larger part of his music. Though initially known for his harmonica, Musselwhite has also grown into a good if laconic singer, one who can stray outside pure blues and convincingly wend his way through a version of Guy Clark's "The Dark." And fortunately, he still has enough wind to blow his harp—though not as loud or fast as in the past—on several numbers including the closer, "A Voice Foretold." The blues have never been a complicated musical form but they do ask a lot emotionally from its genuine practitioners, a demand Musselwhite meets in the liner notes with the only right answer, "My heart is definitely in it." © Robert Baird/Qobuz