Charlie Musselwhite: ‘I ain’t lyin’!’

Charlie Musselwhite, who is coming to the Luther Burbank Center this Saturday as part of a blues program with Elvin Bishop and Taj Mahal, used to live in Geyserville. That much is well known locally, though while he wasn’t exactly a hermit he didn’t play the part of a local celebrity, either. He did have an hour-long blues program on KRSH-FM on Sundays, its purported location being the back porch of a house in Clarksdale, Mississippi, overlooking the Sunflower River.

It turns out that everything he said was true—or, in Charlie’s phrase, “And I ain’t lyin’!” Though they had owned the Clarksdale house for some years, only since 2021 have he and his wife Henrietta lived full-time in Coahoma County, Mississippi, giving up their Sonoma County home for their Southern roots.

Musselwhite, born in Mississippi in a small town called Kosciusko, grew up in Memphis (when he later moved to Chicago, he became known as Memphis Charlie). He was one of the first generation of white Chicago blues musicians who helped bring Black urban blues to national attention. At the time, though, it was the Black musicians doing the favor to the white kids by giving them a break on stage, not the other way around.

Since his first album in 1967, Stand Back! Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite (Vanguard, 1967) to his most recent, 2022’s Mississippi Son (Alligator, 2022), the lanky Southerner with the lazy drawl has probably played to almost as many blues fans in the world as anybody, yet he remains easygoing and as down home as they get. So naturally we asked him if he missed Sonoma County.

Charlie Musselwhite: Oh, sure. We love Sonoma County and it was real good to us, and we have a lot of really good friends there. And the food and just how it looks with the hills and mountains, it’s a beautiful place. One of the most beautiful parts of the world. So yeah, we love it and miss it, and it has a special place in our hearts.

What are you going to do when you come back this week?

I’ll see some friends, and I’m gonna go see my acupuncturist up in Cloverdale. You know, just enjoy as much as I can, mostly staying with friends and enjoying some meals, and I think that’s about it.

Did you have any favorite restaurants here?

Oh, yeah, sure. There’s a lot of them. There’s Agave and El Taco Grande in Healdsburg, and Diavola and Project 128 [in Geyserville]. It’s a small place. It used to be a winery there, but now it’s a little bar and grill and they have sandwiches, and it’s really a good place. Mmm. It’s just down the street from Diavola. But El Taco Grand is kinda like old Healdsburg, and I like it there too. The carne en su jugo was killer.

What about in Clarksdale? Have you found any good restaurants there?

Sure, the Rest Haven. It’s been there since the ’40s; it’s owned by a Lebanese family. So half the menu is like down-home Lebanese food, the other half is down-home Delta food.

You’re playing with Elvin Bishop this weekend. You both go way back—when did you first play with Elvin?

Neither one of us remember! You know, we used to do these package shows where we’d all be on a bus and it’d be a lot of acts and we would play performing arts centers … There’d be one rhythm section that backed everybody up. And we would play solo and together and trios and all. In one of those, a couple of those, I think, it was the first time that I recall that Elvin and I would go out on stage and play a few numbers, just the two of us.

And it went over so well, and we enjoyed doing it so well, and it was so easy because we both know all the same tunes and know that style so well. It’s  like falling off a log, it’s so easy to play together.

So we decided to do more of that, and it just really caught on. At one point we decided, well, we should have an album for sale out there in the lobby when people are going home. So we recorded 100 Years of the Blues (Alligator, 2020) and that got really great reviews and got nominated for a Grammy and stuff like that. It created this whole momentum, and it’s still rolling.

Last year you had a role in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Martin Scorsese, 2023). That was a great spot you did there. It brought the whole movie to life.

Well, it was a small scene, but it was pivotal to the story. I don’t know if you know this or not, but there’s a whole backstory if you read the book. In the book, there’s a photo of an outlaw named Al Spencer. And I have Al Spencer’s rifle. Notches he carved in it of people he killed, and he carved his name into it. He had a gang, and they robbed banks and trains. The reason I have that rifle is because he died in a shootout with my grandfather. And my grandfather’s name was Charlie Musselwhite.

I told Scorsese about it and he thought it was, I don’t know, magical or something. He was filming everything right where it happened, so it was kind of like Charlie Musselwhite was back. It’s not in the movie, it’s not in the book—but it’s the truth. And I know it because I’ve got the rifle to prove it.

How did you manage to get your favorite phrase in the finished movie?

Well, what happened was, right before filming, they sent me the script of the scene. I’m looking at it and I’m reading it and I’m thinking, “Gosh, I don’t even talk like this. I gotta rewrite this the way I talk so I can memorize it.”

So right before the shooting Scorsese said, “Now just say it in your own words, and feel free to improvise.” I thought, I’m glad to hear that because I am saying it in my own words, and I know exactly what I’m gonna throw in. After I said my lines, I said, “And I ain’t lying!’’

And he liked that. He didn’t know that it was something like my signature, but he gave me two thumbs up and a big smile.

Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop play with Taj Mahal at Luther Burbank Center on Saturday, July 20. Tickets start at $75 and are available at lutherburbankcenter.org/event/taj-mahal24.