From the Vaults – Blues News

 

     Blues Music Magazine is a quarterly publication I have subscribed to for many years.  I have been a fan of all types of music for years but it was former WOAS-FM General Manager Mike ‘Zenith’ Bennett’s over the top love for the genre that got me deeper into the blues.  BMM is published quarterly by the Blues Music Group LLC in Henderson, Nevada.  The BMM group also hosts their own online store at BluesMusicStore.com.  Editor-in-Chief Art Tipaldi does a masterful job of assembling issues covering all topics related to the blues.  The magazine covers new artists, pays homage to legendary bluesmen (and women), and reviews recently released music.  Over the years, there have been reviews of artists who have appeared in Ontonagon Country like Measured Chaos (Al Jacquez’s most recent band), The Rusty Wright Band, Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band, and The War & The Treaty.  Many of the albums reviewed are available via the music store along with a good number of older records being sold at discounted prices.

     Blues artists have to qualify as some of the hardest working, down home musicians on the planet.  I greatly enjoy hearing their back stories about getting started, forging a career, and life lessons learned on the road.  Before I forget to mention it, it has become my habit to donate my copies of Blues Music Magazine (and Guitar World as well) to the Ontonagon Township Library when I finish with them.  If you have a casual interest in the musicians and music covered in these publications, donating them to the library is not only a good form of recycling, it helps bring others into the fold.  If this helps these hard working folks sell more music, that is a bonus.  This edition of FTV will cover some of the highlights of Issue NO. 45 from the Spring of 2025 (which, by the time you read this, will be on the magazine shelves at the OTL).

     As far as featuring legendary bluesmen, one couldn’t do better than Issue NO. 45’s cover artist Charlie Musselwhite.  The harmonica virtuoso’s newest album (Look Out Highway – Forty Below Records) drops in May of 2025, so BMM’s Matt MacDonald sat down with him to find out what has been going on in the 81 year-old musician’s life.  The new album was recorded at (guitarist) Kid Anderson’s Greaseland Studios in San Jose, California just as the COVID-19 Pandemic began shutting down the live music business.  According to MacDonald, the album, “is full of music that touches on life-spanning, career-defining themes, while looking and moving forward with the ease, sense of purpose, and feeling that so identifies his music.”  With a COVID delayed release of nearly five years, the LP doesn’t sound dated.  Musselwhite’s universal musical themes come with a long shelf life.

     Musselwhite reminisced about his first record in the BMM interview:  “I remember my first album – which was recorded in Chicago in 1966.  We did that in under three hours because that is all the time they said we had.  [Chuckles at the memory] ‘You’ve got three hours!  Knock it out!’ And it has never been out of print and it’s been out for over 50 years!”  The album in question is Stand Back!  Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite’s Southside Band.  Charlie still marvels at how much he accomplished in the five years he lived in the Windy City, but he also attributes that prolific time to his age then:  “When you’re 18 you can do more than when you are 80.”

     Musselwhite’s debut album was recorded when he was 22 years old, four years after he relocated to Chicago from Memphis.  The legends in the making on the Chicago blues scene took to the “white kid from down home who was brave enough to come out and see them play.”  It is an unusual origin story to say the least, as Charlie told MacDonald:  “They were really flattered that I was there, and they were eager to get me to play with them, and they pushed me to sing.  I didn’t want to sing.  ‘You gotta sing.  Come on, come on.  You can do it’.  They would make me sing and it was fun for them and it was a learning situation for me, and I was having fun.”  After seeing Big Walter Horton, Charlie asked him about the different harmonica positions he was using and it opened up a whole new world for him:  “That was….’Wow!  It was eye opening.  A whole ‘nother way to play!”

     Another encounter, this time with Little Walter Jacobs, taught him another lesson.  He wanted to show Jacobs what he had learned from Horton (about the different positions) and Little Walter shrugged his shoulders.  He told Musselwhite, “That ain’t nothin’.  You can play in ‘E’ on a ‘C’ harmonica, too.”  Charlie’s mind was now fully blown:  “Wow – a fifth position!  E!  God!!  From them, I realized that any octave I could find, there’s got to be a way to get from the low note to the higher note and have a phrase there of some sort and put you in that key.”  Putting this knowledge to work helped Musselwhite form his own identifiable style that he has stuck with for nearly sixty years.

     Charlie hasn’t forgotten the legacy of his old friends and mentors.  He told MacDonald, “In a way, they’re still with me.  They are memories.  I can see ‘em.  I can hear ‘em. So I carry them with me.  You know, we are all just walking each other home.”

     Legacy bluesmen covered in Issue NO. 45 also include bassist Bob Stoger and guitarist ‘Steady Rollin’ Bob Margolin.  At the age of 94, Stoger is the oldest actively gigging blues musician in the world.  Having played 70 gigs around the world in 2024, he surpasses other ‘old guys’ like Buddy Guy and Bobby Rush (who only tip the age scales at 88 and 91, respectively).  Stoger arrived in Chicago in the 1940s with a simple Kay guitar which he eventually turned into a four string bass.  It would take until the late 1960s before he would own a Fender Precision Bass.  He gave the following sage advice to other players:  “The younger kids got the fancy stuff in their minds, so I tell them, ‘You have to be disciplined to play the blues.  You can overplay the blues because it is so simple’.  Mostly I teach them the dos and don’ts when you are on the bandstand.  Music is a very fast lane, and you can get hung up very easily.”

     Bob Margolin is a regular columnist for BMM penning his Around the World feature.  Like Musselwhite, Bob was a white kid who got the opportunity to play in the Muddy Waters Blues Band from 1973-1980.  In his Spring 2025 article (titled Road Stories), he mentioned that Muddy’s band split from him in June of 1980 over problems caused by Waters’ manager.  There were no hard feelings and Margolin found himself opening for Muddy at The Bayou in D.C. in November of that same year.  Bob says, “After, I had a long talk with him, not the last before he passed on April 30, 1983, but certainly the deepest.  Muddy looked old, sad, and tired.  He told me, ‘It took a lot of spirit out of me when Bo (Diddley) passed.’  Blues the feeling, not the music.”  Also like Musselwhite, Margolin has a new album out simply called Thanks.  The album aims Thanks to be a celebration of his legendary blues friends and also a tribute to the 50 years that have passed since he joined Muddy’s band.

     As far as the younger side of the blues talent pool, BMM’s Karen Nugent introduces readers to new talent Delanie Pickering whom she calls ‘Vinyard’s Secret’.  Pickering grew up in a ‘musically inclined family’ in Concord, New Hampshire.  She picked up guitar at the age of 16 but after a couple of ‘unnecessary lessons’, she found, “It was more fun NOT to take lessons.”  She also discovered her father’s record collection in the basement that included some blues albums, but with no local scene at that time, she got bored and moved on.

     She didn’t abandon the genre.  By 18 she had taken part in several festivals and blues challenges in her home state.  She ended up representing the New Hampshire-based Granite State Blues Society at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.  She decided to van herself around the East Coast and ended up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Her family had vacationed there and she decided to hang around for a while.  Eventually, Delanie caught the ferry seven miles out in the Atlantic Ocean to visit the island of Martha’s Vineyard.  She checked out the music scene there and the first band she saw was Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish.

      Living on the Vineyard, Pickering worked as an UPS driver and at a local coffee shop, but she didn’t tell anyone she played guitar.  At some point, she slipped a copy of a CD she had recorded earlier to a fellow coffee shop employee who also happened to be the Bluefish’s drummer.  She also helped Hoy with his commercial fishing business and building chimneys.  Hoy heard her CD and was astonished how good she was.  He encouraged her to start sitting in with some other local musicians, including his band.  Bluefish pianist Jeremy Berlin says, “She is a very interesting person.  She is a private person – she was around for months, just listening to bands at clubs and not playing music.” 

      In March of 2024, Berlin invited her to come with him and play with a French rhythm section at a festival in Europe.  It went so well (Berlin says, “the cat was out of the bag”) that she was invited to play at the prestigious Lucerne Blues Festival with Berlin and the same rhythm section.  Berlin continues, “Nobody had heard of Delanie but she fronted the band.  It was interesting to witness people literally dropping their jaws.”  Doug Deming of Doug Deming and the Jewel Tones was one of the ‘jaw droppers’ and was so impressed, he successfully recommended Pickering for the 2025 Winter Blues Festival in Des Moines, Iowa.  Deming says, “I really liked her style and loved her voice.  She had a cool, quirky vibe on stage that was interesting and unique.  Her own sound and modest vibe shines through onstage and is inviting.” 

     Longtime Bluefish guitarist Buck Shank was planning to retire and Pickering had already been tabbed to replace him, even before he announced he was leaving.  Hoy told BMM, “We figured we would give her a safe place to learn the ropes of the music biz.  Let her develop at her own pace.  Of course, the day would come when she’d start moving on up.  She’s ready to fly now.”   I am betting we will be hearing a lot more about Delanie Pickering in the future.

     With all the political rumblings going in the first months of 2025, I was surprised to learn a few things from Art Tipaldi about American-Canadian relations in terms of the music business.

Tipaldi opens each issue with his thoughts under the banner Riffs & Grooves and in Issue NO. 45, he reported some interesting information he picked up on January’s Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise.  The LR&B Cruise operates just like all the other themed cruise events (like the Kiss Kruise) and gives fans a chance to spend time with a host of blues artists who perform throughout the trip.  The January cruise featured a bevy of Canadian bands and musicians like Colin James, Sue Foley, The Blackburn Brothers, Dawn Taylor Watson, Steve Mariner, and U.S. ex-pat Kenny ‘Blues Boss’ Wayne. 

    During a panel discussion Tipaldi held to discuss the roots of Canadian blues, Watson brought up a subject that most American fans (including the Editor-in-Chief of BMM himself) were not aware of.  In order for Canadian musicians to work in the United States, they must first obtain a P-2 Work Visa.  The P-2 has specific requirements that must be met, according to Tipaldi:  “The artists must have concrete plans to perform in the U.S.  The musicians have to provide an itinerary of dates and places he or she will be working in the States for the duration of the visa.  That means if you have plans to be in the U.S. for the entire duration of the visa, one year, you have to outline every gig or show or festival in your plans.”  

     The visa is by no means free and there is a strict timeline that must be followed.  The shorter the time period when filing, the more expensive it becomes.  To get a permit 90 days out from entry, the cost is $460.  If the turnaround time is only 30 days, the price rises to $2960 because there is a $2500 ‘expedited processing fee’ added.  Fees are all in U.S. dollars so the cost for Canadian artists are actually higher with the monetary differential north of the border.  The fees double when technicians and crew members are added to the bill.  Colin James further explained:  “Anyone touring with you has to be on the application.  If your light man, your sound man, your guitar tech is not on your list, they are not allowed in [to the U.S.].”

     Tipaldi reminds readers that there is an arbitrary line called the border separating our two countries.  In recent days, the talking heads on the various news channels have been reminding us that it is the longest, unguarded border in the world as they wrestle with trying to explain why the United States has seemingly declared an economic war with our closest ally and neighbor.  Those promoting this extremely dangerous economic agenda of placing ridiculously high tariffs on everything from soup to nuts keep saying, “Canada has been very unfair to the United States.”

I would point out that the requirements of the P-2 Work Visa show just the opposite is true.

     Brian Slack (a Canadian promoter, agent, manager, and artistic director) points out, “For American acts to come to Canada, they don’t have to worry about a visa.  All they have to worry about are tax waivers.  That’s the most complicated thing they have to do.  Our acts have to get a P-2 visa, which means U.S. artistic directors who work four or five months out have to commit to the artist way in advance.  Otherwise, the artist is paying almost $7,000 out of pocket to expedite the process.”  Up to now, I have often read about bands popular in Canada and wondered, “Hmm, why haven’t they been in the states?”  The answer to that question is quite clear – U.S. acts have much fewer impediments to tour north of the border than their Canadian counterparts have to break into the U.S. market.

     Watson confirmed this very fact:  “One thing about playing in the States is that in order to play and tour in the U.S., you have to have that visa.  It seems to be a lot easier for an American artist to come and play in Canada.  If I have a show months from now in the States, I have to put in all the paperwork now.  And it is pricey.”  If the United States does not come to grips with the damage being caused by the application of these willy-nilly tariffs, it won’t take long to trickle down to the music industry.  If we thought the shutdown of the live entertainment industry by the COVID 19 Pandemic was bad, these cat-and-mouse economic policies will prove to be just as detrimental to those who try to make a living creating and performing music.  That, in turn, will make it more difficult for fans to see some of their favorite artists live.

     Tipaldi underscores this recent revelation at the end of his Riffs & Grooves:  “Unfortunately with the current border situation, there appears to be no concessions for Canadian musicians or their American fans.”  Good policies help create and maintain good neighbors.  I am not the only one who thinks this reshaping of the American – Canadian relationship is a big mistake.  Let us all push for common sense to rise to the top before permanent damage to our relations with our neighbors to the north (and the rest of the planet) upsets the whole apple cart.

Top Piece Video:  Delanie Pickering performing at the festival in Lucerne in 2024.  She is going to go places!