Have Mercy! Harper and Musselwhite Renew Their Blues Bond

EDITOR’S NOTE: As 2018 comes to a close, we’re looking back at some releases from the year that we didn’t get a chance to write up when they were released. Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite’s No Mercy In This Land was released in March.

There’s a moment on the title track to No Mercy in This Land, the second album-length collaboration between Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite, where the band stops – except for Jesse Ingalls’ droning B-3 – as Musselwhite addresses his 93-year-old mother’s murder at the hands of a burglar. He sings, “Father left us down here all alone / my poor mother is under a stone / with an aching heart and trembling hands / is there no mercy in this land?” There’s a sort of hiccup — a brief hesitation — between “my poor mother is” and “under a stone.” That hiccup is real; that hesitation is the blues.

Harper wrote the verse specifically for Musselwhite to sing. It’s Musselwhite’s only vocal on the album, but the gravitas is apparent. It proves that less is indeed more. 

The pair’s friendship dates back over 20 years, to when they were introduced by John Lee Hooker while playing on a version of his “Burnin’ Hell” for The Best of Friends compilation. Back then, Harper was a young hotshot on the jamband circuit, opening for, hanging out with, and collaborating with Dave Matthews and Gov’t Mule, among others.  Eventually he teamed up with the Blind Boys of Alabama for 2004’s There Will Be a Light, which No Mercy in this Land most closely resembles in terms of Harper not only immersing himself respectfully into the sound of his collaborator, but proving he can write and arrange new songs that may draw from a particular style without being bound to a formula for nostalgia’s sake. The songs on Mercy are not meant to be retro exercises. They are alive and of the here and now.

Harper and Musselwhite’s first album together, 2013’s Get Up! earned the duo a Grammy and critical acclaim, so it seemed inevitable that another collaboration would eventually occur. No Mercy in This Land deepens the connection made on Get Up! Where that album is the sound of two men sharing their talents with each other and celebrating the blues, Mercy is the deepening of that bond. The themes are darker, the blues more lived-in. 

Proving that his playing gets better with age, Musselwhite occupies Mercy not as an elder statesman, but as a true collaborator with Harper. Musselwhite’s credentials are bona fide. He was born in Mississippi, moved to Memphis by high school age, and subsequently ran moonshine. He moved to Chicago at the height of the blues revival of the ’60s, sitting in with everyone along the way from Furry Lewis to Big Joe Williams and Sonny Boy Williamson. After starts and stops along the way, including a decades-long drinking problem, by the late ’80s he seemed to find his footing and started touring and releasing a steady stream of critically acclaimed albums.

On Mercy, Musselwhite’s harp dances around Harper’s vocal and guitar on tracks like the jump-blues “Bad Habits” and the Jimmy Reed-like “Movin’ On.” The start-stop blues-rocker “The Bottle Wins Again” exposes Harper’s jamband roots while Musselwhite digs into the groove with amplified Little Walter-style runs. 

It’s when the tempo slows, however, that the album rises above a typical roadhouse jam session. “When Love is Not Enough” is a slow soul burner in the tradition of those classic Stax sides.  Harper’s vocal cracks under its vulnerability, while his “Nothing at All” is a late-night lament driven home by Musselwhite’s haunting harp.

With Musselwhite, Harper seems to push himself harder, his vocals more expressive, his songwriting sharper, his guitar playing grittier. In turn, with Harper, Musselwhite has found a kindred spirit, quite possibly someone who reminds him of that young kid who opened for Cream at the Fillmore West all those years ago, someone with whom he can share the burden, joy, pain, and sometimes mercy of the blues. 

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