While best known in the music world as the writer of the classic blues movie ‘Crossroads’ (1985), Fusco’s screenplay was inspired by his teenage years as a southern bar-and-grill musician in Florida, the Mississippi Delta, and New Orleans.
Fusco started on a Hammond T-200 in the 1970’s as co-founder of the Travis McComb Band, a popular southern rock outfit on the New Haven, Connecticut music scene. After opening for Virginia’s Dixie Road Ducks, Fusco was recruited by the veteran southern band and joined them on an eastcoast road tour.
Fusco left the Road Ducks to return to school in Florida, and was soon accepted into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he wrote the screenplay ‘Crossroads’ and won a national award which brought his writing to the attention of Hollywood. Only a few years removed from busking in New Orleans, he found himself collaborating on his movie with Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson, Sonny Terry, Frank Otis Frost, and Steve Vai.
Fusco would go on to write and produce the movies ‘Young Guns,’ ‘Young Guns 2,’ ‘Thunderheart’, ‘Hidalgo,’ the Academy Award-nominated ‘Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,’ and many others, including the recent Netflix hit ‘The Highwaymen’, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson.While shooting ‘The Highwaymen’ in New Orleans, Fusco found himself back in his early musical haunts and made a full-circle return to music.
Reconnecting with the Dickinson family of the North Mississippi Allstars, he wrote and recorded an album of originals, produced by Cody Dickinson. The debut release was critically acclaimed and Fusco would then write and record a double album called ‘John the Revelator’ which again was received with much acclaim. Dickinson recruited Fusco to play B3 on Hill Country Revue’s third album ‘HCR III.’
Fusco’s B3-driven band ‘The X-Road Riders’, features Cody Dickinson and Sarah Morrow, the former band leader of Dr. John and the trombonist for the Ray Charles Orchestra.
Currently, Fusco is merging his music and movie passions, writing ‘Phantom’, a movie-musical set in modern-day New Orleans, produced by John Legend and Harvey Mason Jr. He is also writing the screenplay for a new movie about Rick Hall and the Muscle Shoals Sound.
