Cha Cha the Blues. Charlie Musselwhite. 1967. Vanguard.

 Mythologies endure only because the stories about them persist. A recent hour long Netflix documentary about Robert Johnson at the crossroads foregrounds details of the artist’s life that have since become thematic hallmarks of blues mythology: peripatetic and existential restlessness, martial infidelity, abandonment, musical proficiency, criminal jealousy, economic and racial injustice. The blues, the historical record tells us, is centered around the fatigue that accompanies the unending process of having to reclaim one’s personal identity amid the toil of relentless deprivation. Charlie Musselwhite was immersed in blues reality from a young age—his family moved from Mississippi to Memphis when he was only three and rock and roll was still in its infancy. From there, he later moved on to Chicago where he apprenticed with the electric American masters while making a name for himself as an emerging blues harp player. His debut record, Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band was released in 1967, and featured Harvey Mandel on guitar, Barry Goldberg on keyboards, and the rhythm section of Bob Anderson and Fred Below. With a single bass note, Cha Cha the Blues bellows out of the gate with the single-minded urgency of a battlefield messenger sent from the American ghetto with news of the arrival of a new chapter in the beauty of social integration. The song masterfully probes the primal mystery that unites us all, fueling our instinct for human congress with an American southern energy that declaims the primacy of shared humanity in a time of failed human rights. Over half a century following the release of Musselwhite’s debut record, electric blues has unfairly been relegated on the national pop stage to an ex officio commodity in search of a musical  tradition to trade on. The irony of a singularly unique American art form being reduced for the second time in its history to little more than a minstrel contrivance—in this instance by an institutional elite that purports to know better—is itself a grievous infringement upon artistic integrity. American culture needs more of the inspired use of that orchestrated, accelerated tempo that gives Cha Cha the Blues its frenetic, centrifugal sense of order, the collaborative dynamism holding its center together. Our current eyewitness to the slow motion televised world apocalypse gives us the opportunity to assume a comfortable middle class posture amid the twenty-first century wreckage, a domestic comfort more alien to the American blues originators as their forced diet of attrition is to us. The laughter of their sensual, godless mysticism is like the distal, twentieth century light from a vanished past in its current phase of erasure. They are the American Buddha.

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