The Blues According to Charlie Musselwhite

“A good attitude and a cup of coffee will get you through just about anything.”

That’s great advice, but it means double coming from Charlie Musselwhite. The 71-year-old harmonica and guitarist is a true living legend of the blues (he was reportedly the model for Dan Aykroyd’s character in The Blues Brothers and has played with everyone from The Blind Boys of Alabama to Bonnie Raitt), and one whose life is marked by the kinds of twists and tragedies that you’d expect from, well, a blues song.

Musselwhite is up for what – should he win – will be his first Grammy as a bandleader at the 2015 Grammy Awards for Juke Joint Chapel, after winning in 2014 for Get Up!, a collaboration with Ben Harper. Talking to Musselwhite, though, you get the sense that for him, making music is its own reward, and one that’s kept him going for his nearly 50-year-career. “It wasn’t my goal to be a professional musician,” he tells PEOPLE. “I just loved music. Period.”

Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1944, though his family soon relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, where he remembers his first experiences with the blues.

“Downtown, I would see these street singers around Beale Street, Main Street. Guys with a guitar or mandolin playing on the corner for tips, and they fascinated me, a little bitty kid, maybe 8, 9 years old,” Musselwhite says. (He also recalls seeing another young kid named Elvis Presley wandering around Memphis at that time.)

“And when I was around 16, I just started hanging out with them,” Musselwhite says. “I’d go to their homes and just sit around, play. I didn’t know at the time that I was preparing myself for a career. I’d really have paid a lot more attention,” he adds, laughing.

Musselwhite took odd jobs growing up in Memphis before striking out for Chicago in 1962. At one point, he drove five-gallon cans of moonshine around in “a 1950 Lincoln with a flathead V8 in it” to Missouri, Arkansas and Mississppi.

Moving to Chicago at 18 years old, Musselwhite had no idea it was the center of its own blues movement: He was just looking for work. “The first job I got was for a driver for an exterminator,” he remembers. “And this was perfect, ’cause I got to know the whole city real fast, and I would see signs in the windows of bars, advertising Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. And it just blew my mind that all my blues heroes were right there in Chicago.”

Musselwhite started heading to clubs on Chicago’s then-rough South Side by night to catch his heroes. “I never showed ’em my harmonica or asked to play, I was happy just to be there I’d go there alone, and once I got to know some people, they told me, ‘Man, we used to see you come in here and we didn’t know if you were crazy, or if you were a cop’ there were no kids my age in those clubs, especially white kids. I never walked on Clark Street in those days and I didn’t see some blood on the sidewalks,” he recalled later in Children of the Blues

Musselwhite lived at the end of Blackstone Street on the South Side (he also roomed with famous blues singer Big Joe Williams at one point), in an area controlled by a gang called the Blackstone Rangers. “It was rough,” he says, laughing. “I got tested, I’ll put it that way But most of ’em just thought I was ridiculous I’d tell ’em I’d been to see Muddy or Wolf and the guys myself would say, ‘Man, what’s wrong with you? Are you crazy? That’s old folks music.'”

It was Waters who gave Musselwhite his start in Chicago. “A waitress I got to know pretty well told Muddy, ‘Oh, you ought to hear Charlie play harmonica,’ and when Muddy found out I played, that changed everything.” Musselwhite’s first album, Stand Back!, came out in “1966 or 1967,” when he was 22, all twelve tracks on the album the result of one three-hour session. With an album as a leader to his name, Musselwhite started getting calls for work, which eventually took him to California.

“Finally someone offered me a whole month of work in San Francisco’s Bay Area for what was for me a lot of money,” Musselwhite recalls of the move. “So I thought, I’ll just take a leave of absence from the factory and go out there and come back,” he says. “But man, I got off the plane, and maybe 10 minutes went by and I just knew I wasn’t ever going back to Chicago.”

Musselwhite continued working on the West Coast, gradually cajoling his friend John Lee Hooker to come out to California. The legendary bluesman befriended the younger musician in Chicago, and eventually Hooker was the best man when Musselwhite married his wife of 34 years, Henrietta.

Henrietta Musselwhite (who handles Charlie’s booking and after whom his label is named) remembers meeting Charlie in 1967 in California, where she’d moved from Seattle after discovering the blues in college. “A friend of mine was a piano player who Charlie hired when he arrived in California,” she recalls. “As soon as I saw him, I immediately loved him in a whole, unquestioning way, like being struck by lightning.”

The pair didn’t get together until 1979, though. “We met many times in the intervening period,” Henrietta explains, “but we were always attached to other people.” They reconnected after she spent some time in Europe, and as she puts it, “Charlie won out over the others by being so very kind and loving to my 3-year-old daughter Charlie proposed on the phone while he was on the road and we married in 1981.”

Musselwhite struggled with alcohol throughout the 1980s. Ask him about how he met Tom Waits, for example – Musselwhite plays harmonica on several of Waits’s albums – and he responds, “I don’t think either one of us remembers, because that was back during our drinking careers.” Musselwhite says he gradually cut down on alcohol, but couldn’t clear the last hurdle of not drinking onstage. “I’d never been onstage sober,” he explains. “It didn’t really suit my nature to be in front of people. I was never one of those musicians who got into music because he loved attention. That didn’t appeal to me at all. But if I was drunk, everything was just fine.”

But he cleaned up in 1987, crediting one very surprising person with helping him make the final step.

Musselwhite remembers driving to one gig in October 1987 and hearing about “Baby” Jessica McClure, the 18-month-old Texan who made headlines when she fell down a well in her aunt’s backyard. Musselwhite describes listening to her story on the news and being affected by the news that Jessica was singing nursery rhymes to herself at the bottom of the well.

“And I really wanted her to live,” he explains. “So I decided that I wasn’t gonna drink, like a prayer for her, until they got her out of the well. Well, it took ’em about three days, and by that time, she was out of the well, and I was too.”

Musselwhite continued touring and recording throughout the ’90s and ’00s, though a 2003 accident (“one of them,” he notes wryly) derailed him, albeit briefly. Driving in Mexico, he was t-boned by an 18-wheeler, breaking 12 ribs. “When they first got me in the hospital,” he says, “I told the doctor, ‘Well, I got some gigs coming up, I can’t be in here too long.” Despite being told by the doctor that this was a “life and death” situation, he recalls, “I think it was Dec. 6 that was the wreck, and on New Year’s I was playing.”

“I had a gig,” he says simply. “I had to go.”

On Dec. 12, 2005, a man named Quinton Burkes broke into the Memphis home of Musselwhite’s mother, Ruth Maxine, then 93. He strangled her to death, before stealing two televisions, a DVD player, her checkbook and some jewelry. Musselwhite’s father then died a few days later in a nursing home.

“It’s all sort of a blur,” Musselwhite says of that time. “I was just kind of out of it. I had quit drinking by that time, and so my brain was telling me, “You need a drink. Alcohol will help you through this.” And the other half of my brain would say, “Shut up!” And I never did have a drink, and I did deal with it, though it’s just about one of the hardest things I could imagine anyone ever having to do.”

“Words could not describe the ordeal,” Henrietta echoes. “This is something no one could ever understand or get over.” But she adds, “I was so proud of Charlie when the judge asked him if he wanted to go for the death penalty. Charlie responded that his mom had never believed in capital punishment and in her memory he could not recommend it.” Burkes later plead guilty to the crime and was sentenced to life in prison.

Musselwhite later wrote “Sad and Beautiful World,” a duet with his close friend Mavis Staples (of The Staples Singers) about those deaths. “Blues heal what’s been torn apart,” the lyrics read. “Let the river heal my heart.”

Musselwhite struck up a friendship with Ben Harper when the younger musician opened a show for John Lee Hooker that Musselwhite played at in 1994. Watching Musselwhite and Hooker play together, Harper tells PEOPLE, “was what church should feel like. “Me and Ben got to be friends,” Musselwhite adds, “but once we started playing together, that’s when the magic really showed up.”

The resulting album, Get Up! won the pair a Grammy for Best Blues Album; it was Musselwhite’s first after eleven nominations, and Harper’s third. “Working with Charlie in the studio is as pure an experience and expression of the human existence as I have ever known,” Harper says.

They have another album of material planned (Harper says they’re “eight or nine songs in”), which Musselwhite promised Rolling Stone in 2014 would be an expansion on what he called Get Up!‘s “gentle introduction.” Listening to a roaring track like “I Don’t Believe a Word You Say,” where Musselwhite’s blistering harmonica keeps pace with Harper’s roaring vocals and guitar, it’s hard to think “gentle,” but the pair’s respect and admiration for each other is obvious. “If aliens come, they’ll be speaking to Charlie first,” Harper says.

Despite the turns his life has taken, Musselwhite keeps taking on life one gig (and one cup of coffee) at a time. “Compared to when I first started out, it’s tremendously different. Today you have blues societies, blues web sites, blues festivals – none of that existed back then. You couldn’t even read about the blues,” he says, sounding amazed at how the music he first heard on street corners in downtown Memphis has come so far. “For me, I can travel the world and make a good living playing the blues.”

“Back then,” he says, “I couldn’t even call this life a dream, because I didn’t know it existed.”