ADAM GUSSOW comes at the contemporary blues world with a singular combination of talents--an ability to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. An award-winning scholar and memoirist, associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, Gussow spent more than a decade working the streets of Harlem and the international club and festival circuit with Mississippi-born bluesman Sterling Magee as the duo Satan and Adam. He currently performs with both Satan and Adam (recently reformed as a trio) and the guitarist Charlie Hilbert. According to a reviewer for American Harmonica Newsletter, Gussow's harmonica playing is characterized by "technical mastery and innovative brilliance that comes along but once in a generation." When Satan and Adam were honored with a cover story in Living Blues magazine in 1996, Gussow was, according to editor David Nelson, "the first white blues musician to be so prominently spotlighted in the magazine's 26-year history."
Raised in suburban Congers, NY, educated at Princeton and Columbia, Gussow has an unusual pedigree for a blues performer. in Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998), he credits his career to the mentorship of two older African American bluesmen: Nat Riddles, a Bronx-born harmonica player who had worked with Odetta, Larry Johnson, and others; and Magee, a guitarist-percussionist with whom Gussow teamed up after a chance afternoon jam session on Harlem's 125th Street. As Satan and Adam, Magee and Gussow have released four albums: Harlem Blues (1991), which was nominated for a W. C. Handy Award as "Traditional Blues Album of the Year"; Mother Mojo (1993); Living on the River (1996); and Word On the Street: Harlem Recordings, 1989 (2008). A brief extract of Magee and Gussow performing on 125th Street was included in U2's Rattle & Hum documentary.
Gussow's other musical credits include a stint with the bus-and-truck tour of Big River; several decades as a blues harmonica instructor at The Guitar Study Center in New York and in private practice; and an eight-time coach at Jon Gindick's Blues Harmonica Jam Camps. He's also headlined the Mundharmonika-Live festival in Klingenthal, Germany (2008) and has taught at Blues Week in the UK (2008). Long an advocate for the New York City blues scene, Gussow has jammed and gigged with many of the city's national touring acts, including Shemekia Copeland, The Holmes Brothers, Michael Hill and the Blues Mob, Bill Perry, and Popa Chubby. Most recently, Gussow's ongoing series of instructional videos posted at YouTube--the "dirty-South blues harp channel"--has drawn international acclaim from players and bloggers alike.
In addition to Mister Satan's Apprentice, which received the Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Achievement in Literature from the Blues Foundation in Memphis and is being republished by the University of Minnesota Press in 2009, Gussow is the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2002), which won the annual C. Hugh Holman Award given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature as the best book of scholarship in the area, and Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives From Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (2007). Gussow's essays and reviews have appeared in Southern Cultures, African American Review, Harper's,The Village Voice, American Literature, and many other publications. He is the founder and chair of Blues Today, an annual symposium on the blues held at the University of Mississippi and sponsored by Living Blues magazine.
Finally, here's a video that will give you a vivid sense of who I am and what I do. This was shot on the street at the 2008 Arkansas Blues and Heritage Festival in Helena. This is Satan and Adam, with Dave Laycock on drums and an unidentified blues singer sitting in:
....and here's a video of a 2009 performance in which I'm doing the one-man-band thing myself, with the help of some Farmer foot drums and drummer Dave Laycock:
ADAM GUSSOW is an official endorser for HOHNER HARMONICAS
