Charlie Musselwhite

Look Out Highway

Forty Below Records

Pouring one’s heart out through blues music helps in the retention of youthful vitality. No doubt about it. Among the many still pouring convincingly, Charlie Musselwhite at 83 exudes an ultra-cool persona in doing so. I’ve always found Musselwhite’s butter and dust singing voice as attractive as his revered harmonica playing. Ironic, because after he arrived as a teenager on Chicago’s South Side from his childhood home in Memphis, he had to be convinced by the local blues hotshots (now legends) that embraced him to not only blow, but to sing the blues too. Here on Look Out Highway, Musselwhite’s 43^rd album in his long, illustrious career, he sings in a voice of undiminished clarity and authority, tempered only by the depth of his experience. And he sure does play that harp, with dexterous flair and in wide open positions inspired by tips from Big Walter Horton and Little Walter Jacobs back in the day.

Musselwhite released his debut album, Stand Back! in 1967 at the age of 22. That same year, he relocated to California where he was embraced by the local blues community and the counterculture rockers just the same. As a result, his music has always been the product of an open mind. Recently, he rooted himself back in the south, this time to his Mississippi birthplace. That move prompted his 2022 Blues Music Award-winning Mississippi Son on Alligator Records. The album celebrated his return home with raw, often acoustic-driven blues. Look Out Highway, his first for Forty Below Records, follows the raw vein, but in crackling, fully electrified fashion.

Musselwhite’s impossibly deep in the pocket band on Look Out Highway includes longtime touring cohorts Matt Stubbs (also of GA20) on guitar, bassist Randy Bermudes, and drummer June Core. Producer Kid Andersen sits in on piano and additional guitar. While setting up in Andersen’s Greaseland Studio in San Jose, the players encouraged Musselwhite to reprise “Baby, Won’t You Please Help Me,” the opening song to Stand Back! That full circle moment arrives in an intensely swinging take four songs in, taking listeners back to Musselwhite’s beginnings (“I was born in Mississippi; I was raised in Tennessee” while illustrating a longstanding theme in his writing, that of rambling from town to town, the blues on his tail.

In the title song, a penetrating, spooky beat emphasizes a quest to hit the highway, get to his baby, beat the blues for a night, only to hit the road again in the morning. His own up and shuffling “Highway 61,” featuring harp and guitar playing as sweet as southern tea, finds him enticing a lady to join him on his wandering. “Ramblin’ is My Game” and “Open Road” further that focus, each differently, none of these songs tripping over one another at all.

Otherwise, “Sad Eyes,” involving two people in a bar that recognize a common loneliness and spend a why not, no love good time, features the band in a sharp, determined saunter. “Storm Warning,” about a feisty siren blowing into town, finds them swirling madly, Musselwhite nearly growling the lyrics. In each of those songs, Stubbs finds especially cutting notes while Musselwhite soars above him on harp.

In the bouncy “Ghosts in Memphis,” Musselwhite equates the long-gone greats of America’s Home of the Blues—his friends—to spirits, his rapper friend Al Kapone taking the final verse. In that, Kapone reveals a totally incongruent artist’s reverence and desire to create a legacy as important as blues music is, and perhaps, as significant as Charlie Musselwhite’s.

As extraordinarily prolific as ever, Musselwhite wrote ten of Look Out Highway’s eleven superb songs, every one compelling. He chose to cover Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Allen Reynolds’ “Ready for the Times to Get Better” for its timeless relevance, and it’s another beauty in a bounty of them. Charlie Musselwhite has cut perhaps the best traditional blues album of the year in Look Out Highway.

Tom Clarke for MAS

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