Charlie Musselwhite to Sing the Blues at The Center for the Arts on Sept. 16

The Center for the Arts is thrilled to announce blues artist Charlie Musselwhite will be performing in the Marisa Funk theater on September 16, 2022 for this rescheduled performance. Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age; since the 1960’s this legendary blues artist has been a distinguished contributor to the genre, telling his truth with a voice and harmonica 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 blues harp players that came before him with music as dark as Mississippi mud and as uplifting as the blue skies of California.

His life reads like a classic blues song: born in Mississippi, raised in Memphis and schooled on the South Side of Chicago. Musselwhite grew up surrounded by blues, hillbilly and gospel music on the Mississippi local radio stations and around performing musicians in his neighborhood. Musselwhite cut his musical teeth alongside Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf, after arriving in Chicago in the early sixties – just in time for the epochal blues revival – and hung out in blues clubs at night, developing close friendships with blues giants Big Walter Horton and Big Joe Williams, who became his key mentors. In 1966, at the age of 22, he recorded the landmark album Stand Back! to rave reviews. A precipitous relocation to San Francisco in 1967, where his album was being played on underground radio, found him welcomed into the counterculture scene around the Fillmore West as an authentic purveyor of the real deal blues. 

Fifty years of non-stop touring, and more than 30 albums later, he is at the top of his game, a revered elder statesman of the blues nowhere near ready to hang up his harps, with his depth of expression as a singer and an instrumentalist unexcelled and only growing deeper. Musically, his albums range from straight blues to mixing elements of jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex, Cuban and other world music. Four of those albums—1990’s Ace Of Harps, 1991’s Signature, 1994’s In My Time, and 2010’s The Well—were all Grammy nominees recorded for Alligator Records, and remain among his best-selling titles. 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. 

In addition to a significant solo music career, Charlie has been collaborating with the world’s finest artists for many years, most notably with Ben Harper, earning a 2019 Grammy nomination for No Mercy in This Land and a 2014 Grammy win for Get Up!. Other notable collaborators are: Cyndi Lauper, Eddie Vedder, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gov’t Mule, INXS, Mickey Hart and Japan’s Kodo Drummers, George Thorogood, Eliades Ochoa, Cat Stevens and personal friend and best man at his wedding to his still and only love Henrietta, John Lee Hooker. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall Of Fame in 2010, has been nominated for eleven Grammy Awards (winning one) and has won many Living Blues Awards and Blues Music Awards.

To have Charlie Musselwhite on stage at The Center for the Arts is an honor and privilege not to miss on September 16, 2022. This is a rescheduled show, tickets purchased for the previous show will be honored for this date.