* A few years ago, I asked legendary harmonica player Sugar Blue if the story about him was true. I had always heard that he was playing harmonica on a sidewalk in Paris when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards walked by and immediately asked him to be on their next album, Some Girls.

Sugar smiled and said, “Have you ever seen that movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?”

Of course, I said. I’ve seen it dozens of times.

“Well, do you remember at the end of the movie when that newspaper reporter tells Jimmy Stewart: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’?”

Say no more.

Sugar’s sound is unlike anybody else’s. I’m not sure how he does it, but it’s instantly recognizable. I’ve heard him play several times (he was a regular at Rosa’s in Chicago back when I lived there) and I always got a chill up my spine.

Most of you probably know him best from Miss You…

Sugar Blue’s playing is what gives that song its nasty edge. Without him, it’s just a good disco tune. With him, it’s an anthem.

Here he is on one of the more underrated Stones blues songs, Down in the Hole…

Blue kept the Stones honest. He’s so real and so powerful that he forced Jagger - who never likes to be outdone - to step up his game. He also meshed perfectly with Richards’ style, which always amps Keith.

The man can play, baby…

* Sugar learned how to play by listening to Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder records as a kid. He’s since played with Dylan and just about everyone else. Eric Clapton, Frank Zappa, Willie Dixon, James Cotton, Brownie McGhee, Eddie Clearwater, Stan Getz, and on and on and on. At Rosa’s, he often jammed with Pinetop Perkins. Those shows will be forever burned in my mind.

Sugar has a deep historical knowledge of the blues, combined with an ability to grab the genre by the tonsils and make it his own. These clips pretty much say it all…

* I’m telling you all this because Sugar Blue has a new album out and Chicago Magazine profiled him in their February issue…

Chicago blues may be known the world over, but not many musicians have logged the miles to see just how far it has traveled. The exception is Sugar Blue, 60, the famed harmonica innovator and Grammy winner who honed his craft on the South Side from the masters James Cotton, Big Walter Horton, and Junior Wells. Sugar Blue, born James Whiting, now spends most of his year traveling Europe in an RV and performing shows, from large festivals to clubs.

Even with all the touring, he has finally found time to record Threshold (Beeble Music), his first new album in three years, out in February. Despite firm roots in the blues, his vocal and songwriting styles recall the soul and funk protest anthems of War or Sly & the Family Stone. On one song, he sings, “They call it war, I call it murder / Murder in the first degree.” He writes from experience, having served in Vietnam between 1970 and 1973. “We’re in the 21st century—there has to be a better way for us to solve our problems,” he says. “So many young lives lost for so little. One of these people could be the person who has a cure for cancer. I bleed for them.”

Despite Blue’s schooling by a who’s who of Chicago masters, the fluid tone, speed, and precision of his harmonica playing are rooted in the styles of the bebop saxophone and horn players he met as an up-and-comer at the Apollo Theater in New York’s Harlem, where he grew up. In the Apollo’s heyday, Blue’s mother worked as a dancer there and, when he was a newborn, once brought home a friend—Billie Holiday.

I can’t wait to get my hands on that thing.

* Related links…

* Sugar Blue’s homepage

* YouTube

* Store

* Facebook