E-Mail This Article to a Friend Harp man Paul Oscher goes down in the Delta BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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Paul Oscher knew his life was going to change his first day on the job with the Muddy Waters Band. Barely out of his teens, he’d been hired on the spot by Muddy when they’d met at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre and the blues kingpin had heard Oscher’s way with a harmonica. Oscher was the first musician the driver of Muddy’s van picked up the morning of his initial tour with the group in 1967.

"I knew I was in for an education when Otis Spann and his wife got in at the next stop," recounts Oscher, whose new Down in the Delta (Blues Fidelity) is one of the year’s elemental blues delights. "They sat down and Otis said, ‘Baby, give me my shit.’ She opened up her purse and pulled out a bottle of gin and a pistol. Otis tucked the pistol in his belt and took a long drink of the gin. This was at about six in the morning. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into."

As it turned out, Oscher, who integrated the Waters band, had gotten himself into the thick of the blues. There he stayed for five years. Even playing with Little Jimmy Mae in African-American New York City clubs like the Baby Grand and the Nitecap since he was 15 didn’t prepare him for the experiences he’d have with Waters. He roomed in the legendary bluesman’s house on Chicago’s South Side along with Spann, who taught him piano. There he learned the music, the cuisine, and the culture from the inside. It wasn’t always easy. He tells another story about the night Muddy used his own pistol to protect Oscher from a jealous man who’d blown his girlfriend’s head off at Oscher’s door.

But Oscher left Waters’s group with priceless knowledge. Today, after years of personal struggles and drifting in and out of the music business, he’s become a brilliant one-man variation on the ensemble sound that Muddy perfected, a sound based on steely slide-guitar leads, driving rhythms, rich-toned harmonica, and a style of singing just behind the beat that translates to the ears as a message straight from the Delta soil that Waters, when he was still McKinley Morganfield, farmed before he left the Mississippi plantation lands of Clarksdale for the North.

Down from the Delta, which follows Oscher’s 2004 comeback Alone with the Blues (Electro-Fi), is mostly Oscher alone, and that’s the way he likes it. "I’ve developed my own style of playing harp and guitar and singing that captures the sound that inspires me — the sound I heard on stage and learned how to get by watching Muddy and his great guitarists like Sammy Lawhorn, and playing with Spann down in Muddy’s basement."

There are a few band cuts on the album. Some feature fellow Waters alums Willie "Big Eyes" Smith and bassist Calvin Jones, plus the Band’s Levon Helm and MVPs like Spann disciple David Maxwell and bassist Mudcat Ward. But most of the magic’s created by Oscher alone as he makes his slide emit stabbing cries like a child sobbing in the black Delta night or uses his harp to evoke ghostly voices. And his Southern-by-way-of-Brooklyn drawl rings convincing with every lonely twist of numbers like "Driftin’ Blues" and "Blues Before Sunrise."

If those titles seem familiar, as do "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and "Take a Little Walk," it’s because Oscher’s mostly drawn on classics this time around. But don’t call them covers. "To me, a cover is a note-for-note reproduction of a song, like what a Top 40 band would do. What I do without copying is capture the foundation of Muddy’s music and put my own stamp on it. And I really need to improvise, so I have to be totally in the moment, not thinking about the past. I can’t really listen to musicians that imitate. What’s the point? They can’t play it as well as Muddy and those guys did. Records by Muddy and Little Walter and those guys sound as alive today as the day they were recorded, because they were totally in the moment when they went into the studio. They didn’t care about the past. And that’s where you have to be to play this music with all your soul."