GRAMMY-Award winning, multiplatinum-selling artists Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite will collaborate once again for their new album No Mercy in This Land.
Musselwhite, the legendary electric blues harmonica player and bandleader, was one of the non-black bluesmen who came to prominence in the early 1960s, along with Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, or bands such as Canned Heat. Though he has often been identified as a "white bluesman", he actually has Native American heritage. Musselwhite was reportedly the inspiration for the character played by Dan Aykroyd in the Blues Brothers!
He has released over 20 albums and has been a guest performer on albums by many other musicians, such as Bonnie Raitt's Longing in Their Hearts and the Blind Boys of Alabama's Spirit of the Century, both winners of Grammy awards. He also performed on Tom Waits's Mule Variations and INXS's Suicide Blonde. He has won 14 W. C. Handy Awards, has been nominated for six Grammy awards. received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Monterey Blues Festival and the San Javier Jazz Festival, in San Javier, Spain, and received the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.
No Mercy in This Land is the first of new music from the pair since the 2013 release of their collaborative album Get Up!, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Blues Albums Chart and won a GRAMMY Award in 2014 for “Best Blues Album.”
A musical expression of the kinship between the two, the album recounts both Ben and Charlie’s personal stories and adds to the sonic history of American struggle and survival.
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