Adam Gussow

Adam Gussow is a scholar, memoirist, and blues harmonica player.

Born April 3, 1958 in New York City, NY, Gussow is currently an assistant professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He spent twelve years (1986-1998) working the streets of Harlem and the international club and festival circuit with Mississippi-born bluesman Sterling Magee as a duo called Satan and Adam. According to a reviewer for American Harmonica Newsletter, Gussow’s playing is characterized by “[t]echnical 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 (B.A. 1979, Ph.D. 2000) and Columbia (M.A. 1983), Gussow has an atypical 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 performers: 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 recorded three albums: Harlem Blues (1991), which was nominated for a W. C. Handy Award as “Traditional Blues Album of the Year”; Mother Mojo (1993); and Living on the River (1996). A brief extract of Magee and Gussow performing on 125th Street was included in U2’s Rattle and Hum documentary. Gussow’s other musical credits include five months with the bus-and-truck tour of Big River; commercials for Coke, Nestea, and Swatch; and two decades as a harmonica instructor at the Guitar Study Center in New York and Jon Gindick’s harmonica jam camps.

In addition to Mister Satan’s Apprentice, which received the Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Blues Foundation in Memphis, Gussow is the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2002) and Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (forthcoming 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.