One of blues most lauded journeymen visits WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour

When Charlie Musselwhite arrived in Chicago during the early 1960s, his mind wasn’t on the blues music that would soon became a lifelong artistic calling. It was on work. Any work.

“All Chicago was to me was a big city way up north that had a lot of factory jobs,” said the longstanding harmonica stylist, guitarist and bandleader. “That’s 100% of all I knew about Chicago. Lucky for me, the first job I got was as a driver for an exterminator. I drove him all over town. In driving him all over town, I would see posters, flyers and signs in the windows and bars for Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and all of my blues heroes. They were right there in Chicago, so I quickly discovered the whole blues scene and just started hanging out in the clubs to hear all these great blues musicians.

“I wasn’t asking to sit in and I didn’t tell anybody I played or anything. I had already started learning guitar and harmonica, but I didn’t think there was any room for me to be playing this music. I was too young. I was only 18 when I got to town, but I was big for my age, so I could go into all these clubs and nobody would ever question to see my ID or anything. I just fell into it. Chicago was loaded with the blues.”

Six decades later — a run that would include over 20 albums, a Grammy Award and a dossier boasting collaborations with Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Cyndi Lauper, INXS and Eddie Vedder along with a pack of the city’s most renown blues pioneers — Musselwhite remains one of his generation’s most lauded blues journeymen.

At age 81, his love of making music and his audiences’ reciprocal admiration for a blues harp sound ripe with joy, soul and reverential reflection of the musical giants that came before him remains boundless. Showcasing that endurance is a new album, “Look Out Highway” and a return visit to the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour for a June 16 taping where he will be accompanied by guitarist Bob Welsh.

“The pandemic was just setting in, so suddenly we had all this time on our hands,” Musselwhite said of how “Look Out Highway” took shape. “Clubs were closing. Everything was closing. It was a bleak time, so we went into the studio and just took our time. The studio was called Greaseland and it’s owned by Kid Anderson, the guitar player. It’s actually his home. We all knew each other for decades and were close friends.

“We had all these songs we wanted to record that I had written, as well as one song I hadn’t — ‘Ready for Times to Get Better.’ It was actually a country song (specifically, a 1978 hit for Crystal Gayle that has also been revamped in recent years by bluegrass maverick Billy Strings). The melody was nice for country music, but I didn’t think it worked for the blues, so I changed a few notes here and there to fit my own way of thinking.”

Another curiosity on “Look Out Highway” is “Ghosts in Memphis,” which teams Musselwhite with rapper Al Kapone. The resulting music stays very rooted in a tough-as-oak blues guitar groove and reflects a longstanding friendship between the two seemingly disparate artists.

“Al is a good friend and he’s also a blues lover. Even though he’s rapper, he’s real interested in blues music and the history of blues, especially Memphis blues. It just seemed natural to have him include a rap on this tune about ghosts of Memphis. His delivery was perfect.”

Memphis played a formative role on Musselwhite’s blues upbringing. A native of Mississippi (where he now resides again), he was living with his family in Memphis as a child, soaking up the city’s bountiful musical expression as well as building friendships with some of the city’s most vital blues practitioners.

“Memphis was really a music city,” Musselwhite said. “Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, who were early rockabilly players, lived across the street from me. Slim Rhodes was another rockabilly/country guy who lived about two blocks away. He would set up and play out in his yard. People would come over for a barbeque with the whole neighborhood. There was blues on the radio. There were street singers in downtown Memphis on Beale Street.

“I was fascinated by the street singers, even as a little kid. I loved hearing a guy on the corner playing a guitar, singing the blues. As I got older, I got to know and become friends with some of those people — Will Shade, Furry Lewis and Gus Cannon — and started learning how to play from them. They were really flattered that this young white kid would even know who they were and would come to hang out with them. It was just a real nice time. I didn’t know I was going to become a professional musician or I would have paid a lot more attention to them.”

While the blues have taken Musselwhite from Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago and, eventually California (he had a brief but pivotal film role as Alvin Reynolds in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”), one tune has been a constant. He cut it in Chicago for his 1967 debut album “Stand Back!,” has re-recorded the work several times through the subsequent decades and has regularly used it to close his concerts. The tune is the haunting, Duke Pearson penned “Cristo Redentor,” a composition with its foundation not in the blues, but in jazz.

“It has a very simple melody on top. It’s great that such a few notes can be so powerful. Today, you have these guitar shredders that just cram every bar full of every note they can think of. To me, they sound like somebody with a huge vocabulary but nothing to say. Just the opposite of that is a tune like ‘Cristo Redentor.’ With just a very few notes, you can say a whole lot. It’s very moving. I’ve probably played it over 1,000 times, but it always seems fresh somehow. It’s like it’s alive.”

That sense of enduring spirit continues to sit at the heart of Musselwhite’s blues-hued career.

“I tell people, ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get.’ Things just seem to be getting better, like they have their own momentum. I keep showing up and the music takes me where it wants to go.”

Charlie Musselwhite with Bob Welsh/Pete Mancini

When: 6:45 p.m. June 16

Where: Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, 300 E. Third, for the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour

Admission, tickets: $10 at the door or at woodsongs.com.