Welcome to A Breath of French Air with Sandy Kaye. Hi, and a very big welcome to you. This week we’re doing something a little bit different because today’s episode is going to feature two giant names in the music business who happen to be very good friends.
You don’t have to be a blues fan to know these guys’ names because they’ve both been making their mark for a very long time. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Elvin Bishop and Grammy-winning harmonica master Charlie Muscleweight are fellow blues travellers and living blues giants. The two history-making musicians have more than 100 years of professional musicianship between them.
They’re among the most famous bluesmen in the world. Although they’ve known each other since the early 60s, it’s only recently that they teamed up to make an album together for the very first time. That album’s called 100 Years of Blues, and as you’re about to hear, it’s blues at its deepest, warmest, and most engaging.
My name’s Elvin, I’m from Oklahoma. This is my pal Charlie, now he’s from Tennessee. We’re here with you all this evening and damn glad to be.
We’ve been playing this music a long time. I’ll tell you folks the truth. You know between the two of us, you’re looking at 100 years of blues.
Let me tell you a bit about these two. As white guys into the blues, they were pretty unique. Elvin Bishop grew up on a farm in Iowa before relocating to Oklahoma when he was 10.
Do you remember his massive hit record in the 70s? More on that later. Meanwhile, Charlie Muscleweight’s journey through the blues took him from his birth in Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago, and then to California. In 1966, at the age of 22, he recorded the landmark Stand Back to rave reviews.
Let’s meet Charlie first in Clarksdale, Mississippi. This new album is just fabulous. Is this number 40 or 41? I lost track, I guess.
I really don’t know. So you’ve come full circle, haven’t you, because you’ve moved back to Mississippi and that’s where it all started for you. I was born in another town called Kosciuszko, but I had a lot of relatives that lived here and I used to visit here way back in the 50s.
So some of my earliest memories are from here. Why have you moved back from Northern California now? Well, they were having these fires, you know, the global warming. I mean, it’s real.
And they kept getting closer and closer to my home and I just figured it’s a matter of time before I’m burned out. So I already had a home here in Clarksdale, so why not back up and move while I still got time? As you said, that’s where you grew up and that was your inspiration for all the wonderful music you started making as a teenager. I’ve heard you say that blues is about living it and about being an attitude.
Do you still hold that view? Well, I say blues is your buddy in good times and your comforter in bad times. It’s always there for you wherever life throws at you. It’s more than just music.
It’s like a philosophy or an attitude or a way of life. It’ll get you through the world. That certainly got you through the world, hasn’t it? It must have been easy for you, though, as one of the white bluesmen at the time.
It was never really talked about. I was just one of the guys. I mean, everybody was real welcoming and encouraging and helpful and really pushed me.
I didn’t enjoy the spotlight or being on stage and didn’t really have an intention of being a musician. I just loved the blues and I learned how to play it. I used to go to Pepper’s Lounge where Muddy, it was his home club where he played all the time.
He just thought I was a fan because I would talk to him and I’d request tunes. I never went around holding up a harmonica and pointing at it, asking to sit in. I just never did that.
But somebody I’d gotten to know told Muddy, you ought to hear Charlie play harmonica. And Muddy’s like, what? Charlie plays harmonica? Next thing I know, he’s insisting that I sit in. And that changed everything because a lot of musicians hung out at Pepper’s Lounge where Muddy played and they heard me playing and guys started offering me gigs.
And it’s like, wow, you’re going to pay me to play with you? OK, let’s do it. That was my ticket out of the factory. Oh, I guess you gotta put your flat feet on the ground.
Sing it a few more times, girls. All you wanna do is ride and ride, Sally. Ride, Sally, ride.
All you wanna do is ride and ride, Sally. Ride, Sally, ride. All you wanna do is ride and ride, Sally.
Ride, Sally, ride. All you wanna do is ride and ride, Sally. Ride, Sally, ride.
Wanna be where we wanna be. I’m gonna be wiping those weeds in the high seas. All right.
When you say that you had no intention of being a blues player, what did you think you’d end up being? Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would be possible for me to have a career in music. I mean, all the guys I knew that played blues, they were all adults.
There was nobody my age. When I would talk to black friends of mine that were my age and I’d tell them that I liked blues, they’d say, man, you’re crazy. That’s the old folks’ music.
I’d say, well, I like it. They’d say, man, you gotta get up with the times. I’d say, well, you know, I just like blues.
They’d say, oh, get out of here. That was their attitude. That was their parents’ music.
They didn’t wanna hear that. Now, today, young black guys and ladies are discovering blues and there’s some great players like Kingfish. I can see it from my window is the Delta Blues Museum right over here a couple blocks away.
Right. We have an after-school program for kids to learn how to play music. That’s where Kingfish got his start, right there.
Delta Blues Museum. ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ where I have my fun. When you were a teenager in those clubs and you got up and played with Muddy Waters, did several of the players then take you under their wing and kind of nurture you forward? Oh, all of them were.
Nobody was negative at all. Everybody was, you know, happy to. I think they were curious about who is this young white guy that wants to play the blues, they were flattered that I would come to see them and hang out with them and they were real supportive of me and I just became one of the guys.
I was just, I’d hang out with them just like anybody else would. We’d go out on the road or different places to play and there wasn’t any problem at all. Could you point us to one of your favorite tracks that you did way back then? Well, my first album was called Stand Back and there was a tune on there called Cristo Redentor.
That album has never been out of print and it’s been out over 50 years. It came out in 1967 and Cristo Redentor has been that one tune, that instrumental is really, people want to hear it every night. I’ve tried to quit playing it because I figured people must be tired of it and when I quit playing it, people would say, I waited all night to hear Cristo and you didn’t play it, you know, angry at me.
I said, sorry, I’ll play it next time, you know. What do you think they’ve loved about that over the years so much? There’s just something about that tune that really moves people. A lot of veterans told me just the other day, another one was telling me that it really kind of saved their mind in Vietnam.
I mean, the guys were committing suicide and stuff. They were so messed up from the war, but this guy was telling me that that tune just somehow focused him on getting through and living. I can’t explain it really.
It’s just, it has something to it that you can’t really put into words. It wasn’t long then that you moved to the south side of Chicago and kept making music and reportedly you became the inspiration for Elwood Blues, the character played by Dan Aykroyd in the 80s film The Blues Brothers. How did that come about? Well, Danny told me about it and he said that I used to tour up into Canada and I would play this little club and when he was in college, that was the club he went to often to hear live music and he heard me play there many times and back then I used to wear like a black suit and I didn’t have a hat, but I wore shades and had my hair slicked back and my harmonica case, but I didn’t have the handcuffs.
He had the handcuffs and the hat. He said he got his look for the Blues Brothers from me. He must have been pretty chubby.
He’s a friend today, you know, a good friend. Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi took all the rounds, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Hi. Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Hi.
Heedie Heedie, Heedie Heedie, Heedie, Heedie, Heedie, Heedie, Heedie, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Ho, Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, Ho. Some years later when they made their 1998 musical comedy film Blues Brothers 2000. You actually starred in that too.
Well, I had a little piece in it and I wasn’t supposed to sing in it, but this other, I shouldn’t name who it was, kept blowing the line. So finally the musical director said, okay, Charlie, you got it. I said, what? Got what? I ain’t got nothing.
I know that you were alongside musicians like B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Dr. John Lou Rawls, Paul Schaffer and Steve Winwood amongst others. So it’s one of those. It was a tremendous situation.
We did the whole thing in one day, that music part, all those musicians at one time on that stage was really something. They should have made a documentary backstage of all of us telling stories and hanging out together. There were some hilarious moments.
I can imagine. So come on, tell us who was it that kept blowing the lines. Oh, I wouldn’t want to embarrass them.
Just between you and me, Charlie Musselwhite, huh? Between me and Coco Taylor. That would have been great fun doing that show with all of those musicians, right? It was a blast. It was a really good time.
Which was the song that you actually had to sing? I don’t know the name of it. I mean, it’s in the movie. It’s a New Orleans tune.
I think Gary U.S. Bonds did it. In fact, he was there too. Come on, everybody down in New Orleans.
I don’t know. The lyrics and tape them on an app in front of me so I could look down and see them before I gave my time to sing it. So I wouldn’t blow it too.
By the time you were doing this in 1998, you probably had about 30 something albums out already. And your musical style was really changing from one album to the next, wasn’t it? I don’t know, I guess. I mean, I didn’t really think about it.
I just do where I’m doing at the time. That’s what comes out on the next record. Charlie Musselwhite is still all about experimentation.
No matter whether he’s alongside Muddy Waters or Howling Wolf or in collaboration with many others, his music is all about the blues.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. After more than 50 years of non-stop touring, performing and recording, Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age.
After collaborating with some of the world’s finest artists, including Ben Harper, Cyndi Lauper, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, In Excess and even Cat Stevens, he’s nowhere near ready to hang up his harps. Do you have an absolute favourite song? Well, if I did, it would be a different one tomorrow. Tell me today so we can have a listen to what you’re calling your favourite song today.
My favourite song today, Don’t Cry Baby by Hank Crockett. That’s not my song. No, I want to know about your song.
I was thinking about playing that on harmonica. Gosh, I don’t know. You’ve made so many.
Are they all like your children so you love them all equally? Yeah, it’s hard to pick one over another. I mean, each one has its own thing that’s different from another one. Apart from the instrumental that audiences have kept demanding from you for years, which other one do they demand to hear? Sometimes people ask to hear Blues Overtook Me.
The blues overtook me when I was a little child When I was a little child, made this Southern boy wild When I was a kid, took the highway to be my home And the blues overtook me when I was a little child You know, fast bourbon and whiskey made this lonesome boy wild Charlie, I believe that you forged a lifelong friendship with the great John Lee Hooker and you were actually his best man at his third wedding. He was my best man. Ah, okay.
Well, he must have been a lovely person if you became very close to him. How did the friendship start? Well, John lived in Detroit and I lived in Chicago, but he came to Chicago frequently to play and I’d go see him. The first time we met, it was like meeting an old friend.
I mean, we were just immediate friends. We didn’t have to get to know each other. It’s like we had known each other forever.
So you must have been very sorry when he left us, but he left a wonderful legacy behind, didn’t he? Oh, we spent a lot of great times together, working together or just hanging out. I’d go to his house and I’d spend days there sometimes and I wouldn’t even leave. You’ve really worked with an incredible amount of people.
I know that you performed on Tom Waits’ Mule Variations. You even performed on our very own In Excess’ Suicide Blonde. is the color of her hair that she is dressing to meet with him.
She would have finished before it began. Wow! That was interesting. I was on a tour of Australia and one day in my hotel room, the phone rang and somebody said, we understand you’re coming to Sydney and we’re a band called In Excess and we’re recording and we wondered if you’d like to come into the studio.
I said, yeah, sure. I got a day off. I’ll come in.
I didn’t even know who they were. You just said yes. Yeah, I thought it’d be fun.
I figured they’d at least be interesting and they were going to pay me something. I don’t know. I didn’t know they were a huge name because I really don’t know a lot about modern music.
I’m really so into blues and other stuff. So how was the experience? It was great. They were all super nice, just as nice as they could be, real down to earth, straight ahead, good folks.
I really enjoyed working with them and Andrew Ferris was the keyboard player and harmonica player. So I don’t know if he learned my part or not, but I know he did play harmonica with them. I bet he learned a whole lot from you that day.
You’ve played on so many different musical styles, even with Cyndi Lauper. Oh, yeah, Cyndi’s great. I spent at least two years on the road with her.
I can’t speak highly enough for her. She’s tough as nails, but she’s got a heart of gold too. You don’t want to cross that woman.
She’s tough. But I got along with her great. We had a great time and she really knows music and she really knows people.
Is it true of her signature song that girls just want to have fun? We played that in the middle of Times Square one day for some morning TV show. There we were, just the piano player and Cyndi and I playing in the middle of Times Square with all the big buildings in neon all around us. It was great adapting my blues harmonica to her rock songs, but she was a blues lover too.
She says she started out as a blues singer, but she became known as a rock singer and we did an album together that we recorded right in Memphis called Memphis Blues. I know that you also had a pairing with Ben Harper and you recorded the album Get Up. You actually won a Grammy Award for Best Blues Album for that one with him.
Yeah, Ben and I were on the road for probably four years. We did a second album after that first one. We had a lot of fun together.
It’s interesting because his audience didn’t have a clue who I was, but at the end of the day, at the end of the night, they knew who I was. I bet they did. I guess your styles are similar but different.
Well, I didn’t sing on the records, but on the tours when we performed together, I’d always do at least two tunes of my own. Man, the crowd just loved it. Followed the river to the river, followed my lover, followed you through soldiers who find there’s no… Ben wrote that about the murder of my mother.
We would sing verses from it together and it was real moving to me. Charlie also teamed up with Elvin Bishop recently to produce the blues album 100 Years of Blues. We’re still doing shows together.
We had known each other from way back in the 60s in Chicago. We both moved to California, remained friends all these years and I don’t remember how it came about, but somebody suggested we do a duo show just to see how it would go over. We had a lot of fun doing it, so much fun.
We wanted to do it again and, you know, got a good audience and it just got better and better and at some point we thought all these people coming to see us, we should have a CD for sale out there for them to buy on the way out. Good idea. So we went in the studio.
It was actually in Elvin’s garage and we recorded the whole album there. That brings us to Mississippi Sun, the latest album. It appears to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that all the years that you’ve been in this business and all the years that you’ve been writing and finding the depth and going to the truth and the heart of blues music, all seems to be here in this album.
Each track is so deep and meaningful. Can you pick a couple of tracks and walk us through what you were writing about? Well, I’ll tell you how it came about. Just a couple of blocks away from here, a friend of mine has a recording studio and he’s a songwriter and musician and I just was hanging out there a lot.
I still do. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s got all these guitars around and I was playing some and he said, let’s take some of this.
I said, yeah, OK. So we didn’t start out with the idea of making a record. We were just fooling around in the studio.
Then he had the idea of, hey, let’s bring a drummer over. OK, so we tried that. After a while, we had enough tunes.
You know, it looks like we have an old album here. I don’t know if anybody would be interested in it. For me, I was too close to it to have a perspective.
I didn’t know if anybody would be interested in this or not. But when Alligator heard it, they were real excited about it. I’m happy that they’re so excited.
It makes me happy. I guess I did a good thing. You’ve got to have a favourite track on this album, Charlie, do you? Well, again, it’d be like whatever I name today, it’d be different tomorrow.
Which one would you say is closest to your heart right now? I like Blues Up The River. Blues Up The River, Blues Up The River, rolling down to the Gulf. Blues Up The River, rolling down to the Gulf.
I’m gonna drink muddy water till I’ve had enough. She’s gone to Greenville, maybe Natchez, Vicksburg, I don’t know. She’s gone to Greenville, Natchez, I don’t know.
I’m gonna sit here in Memphis, watch this river flow. Saw your baby, saw your baby, made me think of mine. Saw your baby, made me think of mine.
I had to keep talking to keep myself from crying. Eight of the 14 tracks on this album are originals, aren’t they? I’m gonna add them up, I don’t know, I never thought of that. You say so.
You’ve written these over time. You haven’t just written them for the album now. No, I didn’t write anything for the album.
I didn’t even know it was going to be an album. It was just kind of a coincidence. So fair to say then that you’ve still got the music in you just as much today as you had way back in the 60s as a teenager.
I’m still learning. I’m really into it. I get a lot of pleasure out of the blues.
It means a lot to me and even if I’d never had a career in music at all, it’s still something I would do. It’s just what I do. I’ve been lucky to make a living with it.
And when you say you’re still learning, what are you still learning? All things about music, new ways to think about music, new ways to improvise. If you start learning music theory, you start learning the names of stuff you’re already thinking about. And then when you get that in your head, it’s like another door to go through.
Every door you open, there’s another door. You go through that door, there’s another door. Everything leads to something else.
It just keeps unfolding like layers of an onion, except you never get to the end. There’s always more. Will you ever get to the end, do you think? Well, we don’t live forever.
So you’ll keep learning all your living days? Yeah. I mean, like I said before, even if I never had a career in music, this is just something that means something to me. I just have to do it.
I feel drawn to it. It feeds me. Did you ever walk down one old lonesome road? Did you ever walk down one old lonesome road? Well, don’t the highway look lonesome when the sun is sinking low? Did you ever ever drift from town to town? Did you ever ever drift from town to town? Charlie Musselwhite, the Mississippi’s son, clearly has nothing to prove.
To date, he’s released more than 40 albums and is a living legend. He’s a Grammy winner and has played with most of the significant musical icons of the past 50 years. Instead of simply repeating what works, Charlie is a searcher.
He finds new collaborators. He stays on the road to keep testifying to the blues and he continues to make fabulous recordings. Charlie Musselwhite is and always will be a blues man of the highest order.
Thanks so much for your time today. It’s been great to meet you. It’s been a long time that I’ve wanted to chat to you because you are one of the blues legends and anybody who’s into blues knows and loves the name and the work of Charlie Musselwhite.
Well, I admire your taste. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking with you and hope to see you when I come down to Australia.
Yeah, me too, you. Bye. For those listening in Australia, check your local listings because when Charlie comes to town, you really don’t want to miss seeing him play live.
Next up, we meet Charlie’s friend and collaborator, Elvin Bishop.
This is a Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. He was the Butterfield Blues Band’s lead guitarist in the 60s, having formed the group with fellow college student Paul Butterfield.
After leaving for the West Coast, Elfin Bishop recorded five albums, including 1975’s successful Duke Joint Jump. Always one to blaze his own musical trail, no matter if he was playing raw, eye-popping blues or penning the evergreen radio hit Fooled Around and Fell in Love, Elfin has always inspired his fans with his rowdy guitar playing and witty slice-of-life songs. Elfin Bishop, thanks for joining me today.
My pleasure. First off, congratulations on the new album, A Hundred Years of the Blues. Can you tell us a little bit about how the partnership with Charlie came about? Well, I’ve known Charlie, we’ve been acquainted for a long time.
A Hundred Years is, putting it mildly, maybe 125 between the two of us. We’ve been into blues and I met him early on in Chicago in the early 60s and our paths didn’t cross that much, but we were acquainted and liked each other and I’ve always enjoyed his music and I just like him a lot because he’s so solid and real and he’s so many, especially harmonica players that you meet, you can tell they’ve been listening and learning licks off of records and stuff and Charlie, you don’t get that impression at all. He’s original and he seems so solid and real, you know, he just opens his mouth and then, hey, the truth comes out, it sounds like.
Hey, here we are, birds of a feather, whole bunch of blues lovers gathered together, fixin’ to get loose, have a good time, like brother Charlie says, I ain’t lyin’, so clap, stop, holler and yell, we’re all friends here, so what the hell? . . . Birds of a feather! . . . Woo! We did different little tours together just accidentally, the tours were put together by other people, then I think it was either his booking agent or my booking agent started getting offers for the two of us to do things together, so we started doing that a couple years ago and it went over really great. People seemed to really get into it and like it real well and we were having fun, we just played our songs and talked about the old days in Chicago and stuff like that and people really liked it, so we said, hey, maybe we ought to make a record, so we did and it was about the most painless experience I’ve ever had. What do you put that down to? We’ve got a lot in common and just it was something fun to do and with Charlie I don’t ever have to worry about telling him what to play and vice versa, it was all good.
You two share a very similar background, don’t you? Yes, we do. Quite a few things in common. I was talking to him the other day and we were talking about, you know, when we started out getting into blues, it was before civil rights and we’re both from pretty southern parts of the United States and the social scene wasn’t too cool.
About the only way that white people are going to find out anything about blues was listen to the radio and we both, we listened to the same stations in those days and there were some real cool blues stations. In those days in the 50s, everything, all the local stations closed down at midnight and then the big 50,000 watt stations from far away came in clearly. We just listened religiously to those stations and it was a thrilling thing listening to the blues.
In those days when you first started playing the blues, there weren’t too many white people listening to the blues, as you said, yet you and Charlie were both white people playing the blues and somehow you were accepted by that coloured community. How do you explain that? I don’t know. I think the black musicians were, when we got to Chicago, much more welcoming than you would think they would be.
I think they were just glad to see people that really appreciated their music, which hadn’t been the case up to then and they could tell that we really valued it and it was an important thing to us and we loved it. It kind of was understood in those days that even though the races didn’t get along exceptionally well, that among musicians all that was kind of off the table. Musicians were different, that we were a little bit hipper and could understand the things that the average people didn’t, so they didn’t hold too much against us.
Fish, fish, fish, fishin’ I’m goin’ fishin’ Hook, sinker and line I said fish, fish, fish, fish, fish, fishin’ Boy, I’m goin’ fishin’ Just to ease my mind You seem to have come full circle back into your love of blues because through the 70s it wasn’t blues that you were putting out there, you were much more commercially focused, weren’t you? Well, that is kind of an accident of the media, I think. I always played as much blues as the traffic would bear. In the 70s that was diminished down to a little tiny bit, you know.
Most people just didn’t especially want to hear blues, you know. And suddenly this little window opened up. The one and only time in my whole career when the big mass media has had a little compartment that they could comfortably stuff my ass into, you know.
It’s Southern Rock, so it’s an amazing thing. There’s so much power when the media gets behind you, you know. And even like to this day, I’d say probably most people who say Elvin Bishop say, well, didn’t he have some kind of hit in the 70s? What can you do? Well, it wasn’t some kind of hit, it was a huge hit back in the 70s.
I must have been through Leave him alone I know sir Where’s the stone? Fool around, fool around I didn’t realize ever that it wasn’t you singing on it. No, Mickey Thomas, an amazing vocalist. The whole thing was an accident.
We’d done the whole album and then the producer said, well, we just need just one more song. What do you got laying around? Any old thing, you know. I said, well, what about this? So I got the band to play it and I tried to sing it, but you hear my voice.
It did not butter the biscuit on this song. So I asked Mickey, who was in the band, a great musician. I met him.
He was singing with a gospel group and he just killed it. I’ve seen him recently. He’s still got that high, beautiful voice.
He’s got every bit of it and knows even better what to do with it. It’s amazing. I’ll never find you For having lived next to A dream won’t come true Sarah, Sarah Spin your eyes Sarah, Sarah No time to When we first got to Chicago, the south side of Chicago was more like a big, nice southern town with a lot of black-owned businesses.
Blues was the music of the day. It was like hip-hop is now. It was the happening music of the black people.
This album is like the blues was when we first came to Chicago. The old type of blues they played down south. My idea of the golden period of Chicago blues was before the gangs and the drugs and everything imparted a really hard, desperate edge on the blues.
That’s kind of what this is. Why the desire to recreate that? I don’t know. It just felt like the thing to do.
It’s what feels good to us. I think there will always be a certain segment of the population that is going to crave what the blues has to offer. The average person is something in the 90-some percent.
Music is just a trendy sort of thing like clothing styles or hairstyles or just a surface trend thing. Blues is for people who like to connect up their music with deeper things in life, I think. I got a woman that I’m loving Living West Helena, Arkansas I got a woman that I’m loving Living West Helena, Arkansas She buys me long-toed shoes Keeps that brown mule in my jaw Keeps that brown mule in my jaw I like West Helena blues and I like Blues for Yesterday.
I like all of them that Charlie sings. He doesn’t write many tunes but the ones he writes are just the real deal, I think. They just ring a bell right in here.
I’ll ask you a question and I’ll bet you don’t know the answer to it. What is brown mule? Here’s the line. She buys me long-toed shoes and keeps brown mule in my jaw.
I don’t know. All I can think of is a Russian mule, which is alcohol. Close.
It’s tobacco. Brown mule is a type of chewing tobacco. I used to chew it when I worked in the oil fields because you can’t light cigarettes in the oil fields.
Alright. Were you always destined to be a musician, do you think? I was not encouraged by anybody to become a musician. I went crazy for blues and lost my mind.
I used to have this huge radio. In the early 50s, radios were not little appliances. You didn’t go to an appliance store.
I don’t know if they even had… You used to buy them at furniture stores. I remember going to town. We lived on a farm and standing in the window watching TV.
I said, oh, that’s amazing. This big radio combination, 78 RPM record player. I was supposed to be going to bed when I was a young teenager, but I’d leave it on.
About midnight, when the good stations would come on, I’d sit there and those tubes would be glowing orange and the static was happening. Then one night, here came Jimmy Reed playing that real high squealing harmonica on the honest platoon, Honest I Do. I lost my mind.
That was it. I was gone. I was lucky.
I got a scholarship. I could go anywhere I wanted to, which is very lucky because my family had no money. I went to Chicago because I somehow knew that’s where the blues was.
Family was not thrilled about the idea of me playing music because I came from a long line of farmers and nobody had ever had a college education. That was a big thing. Don’t mess this up.
But music took over. There you go. Well, I’m rollin’ down the highway Rollin’ into the settin’ sun You and I are rollin’ down the highway Rollin’ into the settin’ sun I got the blues for yesterday Times was tough but we had fun You know the moon is risin’ You’ve lived your passion, haven’t you? Yes, I’m a very lucky guy.
Elvin, thank you so much for chatting with me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
All the best. Bye-bye. Blues legend Elvin Bishop, he and Charlie Musselwaite are pretty awesome, aren’t they? Thanks for joining me here today.
I hope I can count on your company again same time next week. Take care in the meantime, won’t you? Bye now. Cause it’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye Beautiful day Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away It’s a beautiful day