Mahal says the future of the blues depends on remembering its origins, from the Mississippi Delta to "the mother continent," Africa
Credit: Mike Coeyman
NEED TO KNOW
- Taj Mahal’s new album, Time, features a previously unreleased song written by his late friend Bill Withers
- At 84, the Grammy winner continues to tour and preserve blues traditions while connecting generations of musicians
- Mahal credits African roots and American cultural exchange spanning from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta as the foundation of his roughly 70-year music career
In Taj Mahal's mind, music has never been something that could simply be put away and forgotten.
At 84 years old, the multi-hyphenate creative and blues music torchbearer, born Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr., is still creating, still touring and still actively seeking out new ways to draw connections between the generations of musicians, and traditions, that shaped him.
This is exemplified at its peak by his recently released album, Time, which serves both as a continuation of that lifelong journey and a conscious reflection on the decades he has spent preserving the roots of American music.
Reverence is woven into the fabric of Time, and the album's title track carries a particularly meaningful history: a previously unreleased song written by his longtime friend, Bill Withers. "He was my brother and my buddy," Mahal tells PEOPLE of the late Withers, who died on March 30, 2020. "We saw a lot eye-to-eye because we were different players in the music scene."
Credit: Resonatin’ Records/Thirty Tigers
Mahal says the pull of that track was simple in that it accurately exemplified the same ethos that keeps Withers' music in the conversation to this day: creating something timeless and devoid of trends.
"Every time he played music, he came up with something different and something new, which is really rare," Mahal says. "You can walk up to a new piece of music that an artist composes or writes, and then you don't know what to do because you don't have no link between the last one that you heard."
Though Mahal's weathered, warm and instantly recognizable voice remains the guiding force on Time, the generational singer-songwriter also brought the Phantom Blues Band — with whom he had collaborated on the Grammy-winning Señor Blues (1997) and Shoutin' in Key (2000) — along for the ride.
For Mahal, Time represents exactly the kind of openness his late friend Withers provided the world. By creating this particular body of work, he has extended an invitation for listeners to hear beyond categories and recognize the deeper connections between musical traditions.
"It's not so much what I hope that they hear, it's what I hope that they open up to," he explains. "Maybe just expand their ability to hear."
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The notion of opening oneself to all forms of creative expression has been the driving force behind Mahal's unique blend of blues and world music for the entirety of his career. Throughout his nearly 70 years as a recording artist, and again on Time, he moves freely through blues, reggae, folk, soul and global traditions, always following the roots of each genre rather than what was popular at any given time.
"The common denominator in all the music that I'm playing is the continent, is the mother continent," he proclaims, referring to Africa. "That's what's really the common denominator."
Mahal goes on to discuss how music in the Western Hemisphere was shaped by African traditions, migration, cultural exchange and generations of musicians who continue to push and elevate those sounds today. "There's the Celtic music and the music from the Iberian Peninsula and the Francophone music," he notes. "These different things are constructs or matrices which the music comes through."
And no matter what corner of America he draws references from, "all of those again are couched in the mother continent," he maintains.
Speaking of the corners of America, Mahal has effectively touched all of them in his decades of consistent touring. For 2026, the artist has been taking his sonics across the continental U.S., making stops from coast-to-coast that run until mid-July. For the star, touring at 84 is not about proving anything in particular to himself. Instead, it is grounded in continuing to honor the blessings he believes he was given.
"This is a gift from creation," he tells PEOPLE of both his musical ability and continued health.
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Mahal touts that very connection in the music tied to his heritage, as well as his understanding of creativity itself.
"Whatever you think came from my DNA, came from my sub-Saharan DNA," he says. "That's not something you just slough off because of a construct of how things are supposed to go."
Instead of locking in solely on the longevity he has enjoyed, Mahal makes his central focus an intent to responsibly preserve traditions that may not otherwise receive the attention they deserve.
"I see music as a gift and creativity as a gift," he says. "Painting, dance, literature, all of these things, inventing, ideas in agriculture — all of this stuff oftentimes is not the information that the bulk of people have."
Self-commitment to the cause, as he describes it, is a large part of what keeps him moving forward.
"I've been given the opportunity to live this life as I see fit," Mahal shares. "I know I have a gift and it's more important for me to stick by what that gift is than to just sell it away for a couple of gold coins."
As for how he continues to manage life on the road despite his age, Mahal puts it plainly: "You've got to have a good crew," he says. "You've got to surround yourself with good people." The artist ultimately compares his approach to running a farm, where every element supports the whole.
"Here's the land and then here's all the things that you do on the land," he says. "Here are the buildings on the land. Here's the machinery there that works on the land. Here are the seeds that grow over here."
On the topic of where the seeds grow, Mahal, over the years, has kept the proverbial "seeds" of his genre at the forefront no matter where his career takes him. For the Massachusetts-born creative, preserving blues traditions is less about nostalgia as it is recognizing a still-living culture that is largely overlooked in the modern American music landscape.
"I didn't have to wait until the music business told me that what I was hearing was valid," he says of diving head-first into the blues decades earlier. "Nobody gets to tell me that. I don't have to hear a yes from anybody. I need to hear it from culture, from DNA, from creation and creativity."
Though he was raised in the Northeast, Mahal says his connection to the blues, and world music, came through family, community and a lifelong curiosity about the sounds around him. "My mother's from South Carolina," he shares. "My father was from the Caribbean."
Mahal also recalls discovering the guitar at a young age and quickly feeling kinship to the sounds emerging from Mississippi and then later Chicago, breeding grounds for blues musicians in the 20th century and today. Though his native soil was far from either locales, he was ultimately welcomed by and worked with titans such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Son House and Mississippi John Hurt.
"I started right out with Sleepy John Estes, three of his songs my first album. Sonny Boy Williamson. And I put a little bit of my own writing in it… Robert Johnson too. And then moved on to doing more of my own writing on The Natch'l Blues, but then bringing in traditional things that I liked," he reflects of early days in music and establishing his own roots in the blues.
When discussing Clarksdale, Miss., widely considered as the birthplace of both blues and rock music, Mahal doesn't hesitate to sing praises.
"The crucible," he says of the historic Delta town, which preserves some of the last remaining juke joints in America, such as the iconic Red's Lounge, as well as more modern additions like the Morgan Freeman-owned Ground Zero Blues Club. "It was annealed in that furnace right there," Mahal adds of the blues' origins. On top of that, he says the musicians in Mississippi, Chicago and beyond who created the traditions he now carries set the foundation for musical stylings that cannot be manufactured through any means.
He doubles down, "These folks, they [played] with the same energy that I'm playing with. That's what they did and that's what they got… That was part of what I was doing, was making sure that in another generation, in some maybe contemporary rhythms or musical ideas, that these [blues musicians] didn't go unsung.”
That very same belief in championing continuity is precisely why Mahal looks to uplift younger musicians and encourage connections between generations and the music that shaped him, both through his own recorded works and advocacy on the ground. Despite his historical work, however, Mahal is not looking to have his own praises sung.
"I'm not trying to push myself into someplace that I am not," he says of the concept of legacy. "They can worry about that. I'm not worried about that." Instead, the work he has dedicated his entire life to remains the core focus of the conversation, in his mind.
"Figure out what it is that you were sent here to do," he says. "Be in your sovereignty and your dignity and find your peace. Find out what it is to be creative. Get out of your own way."
After almost three-quarters of a century of actively reshaping the scope of American music, the five-time Grammy winner still sees his ever-expanding creativity as an ongoing conversation with himself and his fans.
"Stick with what's real," he proclaims. "And you can't go wrong."
Time is available on all major streaming platforms now, and tickets to Mahal's upcoming performances are available on his official website.
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