Blind Boys Of Alabama Announced At Pepperdine With Special Guest Charlie Musselwhite

Five-time GRAMMY Award winners and living legends, The Blind Boys of Alabama and American electric blues harmonica master and GRAMMY award winner, Charlie Musselwhite will perform in Smothers Theatre at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, January 17 at the Lisa Smith Wengler Center for the Arts.

In the seven decades since The Blind Boys of Alabama first began singing together, America has witnessed a World War, the civil rights movement, and the Summer of Love; the moon landing, Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; JFK, MLK, and Malcolm X; the invention of the jukebox, the atomic bomb, and the internet. Through it all, The Blind Boys' music has not only endured, but thrived, helping both to distinguish the sound of the American south and to push it forward through the 20th century and well on into the 21st. Consisting of Jimmy "Jimster" Carter, Ricky McKinnie, Paul Beasley, Rev. Julius Love, newest addition Sterling Glass, and led by Music Director and lead guitarist Joey Williams, the group has the rare distinction of being recognized around the world as both living legends and modern-day innovators. They are not just gospel singers borrowing from old traditions; the group helped to define those traditions in the 20th century and almost single-handedly created a new gospel sound for the 21st. Since the original members first sang together as kids at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in the late 1930s (including Jimmy Carter, who leads the group today), the band has persevered through seven decades to become one of the most recognized and decorated roots music groups in the world.

Charlie Musselwhite's journey through the blues was from his birth in Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago and California. Arriving in Chicago in the early sixties, he was just in time for the epochal blues revival. In 1966 at the age of 22 he recorded the landmark Stand Back! to rave reviews. A precipitous relocation to San Francisco in 1967, where his album was being played on underground radio, found him welcomed into the counterculture scene around the Fillmore West as an authentic purveyor of the real deal blues. Fifty years of nonstop touring, performing and recording have reaped huge rewards. Charlie Musselwhite is living proof that great music only gets better with age. This man cut his (musical) teeth alongside Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and everyone on the South side of Chicago in the early 1960's. Thank your lucky stars that he is still with us telling the truth with a voice and harp tone like no other. More than 20 albums later he is at the top of his game, a revered elder statesman of the blues nowhere near ready to hang up his harps, his depth of expression as a singer and an instrumentalist unexcelled and only growing deeper. Musselwhite, more than any other harmonica player of his generation, can rightfully lay claim to inheriting the mantle of many of the great harp players that came before him with music as dark as Mississippi mud and as uplifting as the blue skies of California. In an era when the term legendary gets applied to auto-tuned pop stars, this singular blues harp player, singer, songwriter and guitarist has earned and deserves to be honored as a true master of American classic vernacular music.

Tickets may be purchased by calling our Box Office at (310) 506-4522 from noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and two hours prior to curtain time. Tickets to all events are also available online at: arts.pepperdine.edu/tickets/

The Lisa Smith Wengler Center for the Arts at Pepperdine University provides high-quality activities for over 50,000 people from over 1,000 zip codes annually through performances, rehearsals, museum exhibitions, and master classes. Located on Pepperdine's breathtaking Malibu campus overlooking the Pacific, the center serves as a hub for the arts, uniquely linking professional guest artists with Pepperdine students as well as patrons from surrounding Southern California communities. Facilities include the 450-seat Smothers Theatre, the 118-seat Raitt Recital Hall, the "black box" Helen E. Lindhurst Theatre, and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art.

The Center for the Arts is located on the Pepperdine University campus at 24255 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, CA. Parking is available during performances next to Smothers Theatre for a fee and in the Theme Tower lot with shuttle service at no charge. All programs and artists are subject to change.

For more information about this performance and other Center for the Arts performances and exhibitions, visit: arts.pepperdine.edu. For information about current health and safety protocols at the Center for the Arts, visit: arts.pepperdine.edu/visit/

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