It’s an understatement to say that harmonica legend Mickey Raphael gets around. His ridiculously long list of recording credits includes U2, Norah Jones, Chris Stapleton, Marcus King, Wynton Marsalis, Billy Strings and Mötley Crüe, just to name a few. Until recently, Raphael has also averaged more than 200 concert dates per year with Willie Nelson & Family. That’s the act he’s been most closely associated with during the last 50 years.
Raphael told the Charleston City Paper his long-running globe-trotting career began inauspiciously enough when he was still a daydreaming Dead Head back in Texas.
“I wasn’t immersed in that scene to the point that I would follow them around, but the Grateful Dead was definitely my go-to band in high school,” Raphael said. “I would lay in my bunk bed for hours just getting lost in their songs. I was sort of an outcast growing up and music was my only savior. Those guys seemed like social misfits, too, which really resonated with me.”
In those strange days, Raphael was introduced to Willie Nelson by then-football coach at University of Texas Darrell Royal at one of Royal’s notoriously rowdy post-game pickin’ parties.
“During that initial jam session, I had vaguely been invited by Willie to come back and sit in any time I wanted. So, I just kept showing up and doing that until I started getting asked to actually travel with the band to gigs,” Raphael said.
For a while, however, he was merely volunteering his time, as evidenced by an apocryphal-sounding story that Raphael wryly recalled. “At a certain point Willie asked Paul English, our drummer, ‘How much are we paying Mickey?’ To which Paul said, ‘Nothing!’ and Willie said, ‘Well, double it then.’ Eventually my persistence paid off though,” Raphael said.
And he ended up in one of the most impactful supporting roles ever in country music and beyond.
It’s hard to imagine Willie Nelson & Family without Raphael. His sparse, haunting contributions adorned most of Nelson’s massive hit singles from the ’70s and ’80s including “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” and “Always on my Mind.” His harp was also an integral sonic component of Nelson’s best-loved LPs such as Stardust and Teatro.
Marveling at how things have recently come full circle for him — the Grateful Dead’s Bobby Weir shared the stage with Willie Nelson & Family multiple times this summer — Raphael said that he couldn’t be happier looking backwards and forwards night after night, with his 90-year-old boss and bandleader, for however long that road goes on.
Willie Nelson & Family perform at North Charleston’s Firefly Distillery at 7 p.m. Oct. 19. For tickets and more details, visit fireflydistillery.com.
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