Episode #39: Dr. Adam Gussow - A Man and His Harmonica

As a pioneering blues harmonica player and teacher and award-winning scholar of the blues, Adam Gussow has carved out a singular career.   A professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi who specializes in blues literature and culture, Gussow was one of the first amplified blues harp players to make overblows a key element of his stylistic approach, adapting Howard Levy's innovations in the late 1980s in a way that helped usher in a new generation of overblow masters such as Jason Ricci and Chris Michalek. Since 2012, Gussow has been performing, recording, and touring with veteran blues guitarist Alan Gross as the Blues Doctors.  Their first album, Roosters Happy Hour (2014), hit #14 on the Living Blues radio chart.  Their second album, Same Old Blues Again (2018), garnered terrific reviews.  "Gussow’s amplified--and seemingly effortless--harmonica drives much of this collection," wrote Blues Blast, "and it swings hard. Real hard… [A]n up-tempo album of blues standards… and then some, all generously seasoned with Gussow’s masterful, very fluid harmonica playing." Early in 2020, Gussow and Gross joined forced with Roderick Patterson, aka "Sir Rod," an Atlanta-area singer, dancer, and motivational speaker who happens also to be Sterling Magee's nephew, to form an exciting new trio, Sir Rod & The Blues Doctors.  Their debut album, Come Together, an homage to the music of Satan & Adam, has just been released. An award-winning scholar and memoirist, Gussow is the author of five blues-themed books:  Mister Satan's Apprentice:  A Blues Memoir (1998; reissued in 2009); Seems Like Murder Here:  Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2002); Journeyman's Road:  Modern Blues Lives From Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (2007); Busker's Holiday (2015), a novel; and Beyond the Crossroads:  The Devil and the Blues Tradition (2017), which was voted "Best Blues Book of 2017" by the readers of Living Blues.  His new book, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music, was published by University of North Carolina Press in the fall of 2020.