Though there's not much you can count on in this sorry world, there's always Charlie Musselwhite. He will be 82 years old when you read these words, and he's been playing blues harmonica and slide guitar from a very young age. His first album was released on Vanguard in 1966. Look Out Highway is something like his 20th solo release.

Around 1970 I started listening to blues in a serious way, more out of curiosity than out of attraction. In fact, the attraction part of it was absent because initially blues sounded so unlike anything I was used to hearing that it was easy to leave it unlistened to. The curiosity had to do with all those musicians I liked and respected (starting with Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan) who professed a love of the genre and often incorporated it into their own repertoires. My own infatuation with pure blues took awhile, but when it took, it held. After I began to grasp what these men (Muddy Waters, et al.) and women (Memphis Minnie, et al.) were up to, they became permanently attached to my life.

Musselwhite was one of many blues artists I heard as I embarked on a wide-ranging exploration of blues country. He didn't make a great impression on my unsophisticated hearing. It didn't help, either, that he was white, at a time when in some quarters the dictates of political culture sternly insisted that only Black people, to whom the music belonged, could perform it properly. (The rest was treated as rip-off, now known as cultural appropriation.) This issue carried over from previous race-based disputes in jazz. Those were fading when a new round of controversy, centered in blues, arose to replace them.

One day, listening to a Musselwhite recording -- I don't recall precisely which and when -- I realized that to dismiss him as merely another white bluesman was to be obtuse and stupid. Wherever it began, blues evolved like any other music with a complex history as something to be done well, indifferently, or badly -- period, no other consideration. Musselwhite was, and is, doing it in the first category as brilliantly as it could be done in the last century and can be done in this one.

From his very early days he possessed talent and a fascination with the music and musicians around him. Born in rural Mississippi, he and his family moved to Memphis when he was 3. The city's street performers, among them legendary figures who shaped blues from a rural folk music into something that would change a wide spectrum of popular sounds from jazz to rock 'n' roll and beyond.

But for some artists, downhome blues would be a form worth engaging directly. Mid-century Chicago blues, which brought the Mississippi Delta diaspora to the streets of a tough Northern industrial town, is one. Musselwhite, who migrated to Chicago's South Side when he entered his adult life, soon ingratiated himself with the blues celebrities of the neighborhood clubs and bars. In time he ended up in California, where he still lives, but with a hard-core blues sensibility, traditional but shaded by his own notion of what that means.

So here is his latest album, which shines as luminously as the previous one, titled Mississippi Son (2023). The latter is largely acoustic, the current one more fully electric. They feel of a piece, however, in conjuring up a deep blues, framed by Musselwhite's harmonica squall, at once aggressive and pensive, alongside supporting players committed to the folk music of old blues in a manner one doesn't hear much anymore. The result is organic and authentic, from Musselwhite's dazzling writing to his arrangements which, without imitating any other, are perfectly suited to what they're attempting. While Musselwhite is -- deservedly -- often praised (he possesses a closetful of awards), his blues singing is too seldom singled out for acclaim. I guess you could describe it as a synthesis of historic styles with some other influences, including some physiologically unique to Musselwhite. Nobody else sings this way in any vernacular or popular genre that I've ever heard.

Eleven songs, most dealing with rambling or sex, or with fornication at stops along the road. Not a dud among them. As with any true carrier of the tradition, he boldly borrows or steals (choose your verb) from elsewhere when needed to enhance what he's seeking to evoke. Two classics, "Hip-Shakin' Mama" and "Highway 61," turn out to be not quite the lyric-for-lyric standards a blues geek would anticipate; moreover, that familiar melody on the closer, "Open Road," is taken from Big Bill Broonzy's often-covered "Key to the Highway," as I figured out after my slow-witted brain pondered the matter for a few minutes. But Musselwhite's rewrites are as strong as the originals. Of the wholly self-composed contributions, if I were required to pick my favorites, I'd go for the title tune and the penultimate one, "Ghosts of Memphis," but with no sense of urgency thanks to Look Out's embarrassment of riches.

The most unlikely track, by the way, is a cover of Crystal Gayle's 1978 country-pop hit "Ready for the Times to Get Better," written by the prominent Nashville producer/composer Allen Reynolds. It's not remotely a blues, or even a particularly distinguished song, but since it's in Musselwhite's care, it fares well enough.