BBoouussssoolleess eelllleess && eeuuxx Mallette de métal contenant quelques-uns des harmonicas et micros de Charlie Musselwhite. Charlie Musselwhite’s metal case containing some of his harmonicas and microphones. His limpid songwriting gently explores the boundaries of blues, with two instruments played with extreme mastery, responding to each other, joined together by the vocals. The songs form a personal topography, drawing us into their in his mind. “I still have real vivid memories of when I was inner landscapes. That of childhood, for example. For Harper, a kid,” continues Musselwhite. “My first encounters with it was both loud and silent. He was brought up in a family blues, how it made me feel. Then meeting men that played of musicians who were passionate about guitars (his grand blues. What it was like to hang out with them. This is all more parents created the Folk Music Center in Claremont,vivid to me than what I had for breakfast. It lives in my mind California), and freely admits that they were perhaps a bit too and I go there to get recharged and to remind myself where talkative (unlike Musselwhite, brought up in Memphis amid I came from. . . . It’s like a lawyer goes to his law books to look the silence of a mother who was often absent and whom he up stuff. I go through my old memories to remind myself only saw in the evening for dinner). “Just the sights and sounds where I was, how that felt. It felt really good. And as the time of youth,” says Harper. “I grew up with a lot of people. The goes by, it takes on more quality.” This is how landscapes enter landscape of my childhood was a lot of musical instruments his thoughts when he creates music, alone or with Harper. being played all at once in a music store and a family that was An ink he can dip into. Musselwhite continues: “It’s back to hyper verbose. You don’t only talk about something, you talk those memories I was talking about. Not only just the way it about what you talked about, then you talk about what you looked but the smells of food. Even smells you can’t identify. talked about the day before, then you talked about what you My sister and I talk about the smell of my grandmother’s were going to talk about tomorrow. A lot of talking! A lot of house. There was this wonderful, homey, embracing smell music and a lot of conversations.” Which no doubt created a that you cannot identify, but we’re both very aware of it sufficiently dense atmosphere in which to go deep down inside and remember it vividly. . . . The way the air would feel on himself and reflect about an idea he has had ever since he was your skin at certain times of the year. Freshly mown grass or young: [that]“we’re born with the spirit of the age of which a field that is freshly mown. . . . Imagine being in a barn and we will die. And that as we get older, our spirit proceeds to get the smell of the hay and the sky gets really dark and black, younger, so that when we pass, our spirit is reborn. And that’s blue-black, with thunder in the distance and you can smell been inside of me since I was a kid and I’ve never known the rain before it comes and then how it sounds hittin’ the roof why I knew that at a very young age. . . . I’ve never shared that of the barn. Boy that feels good!” The picture is there. And with anybody actually.” “That really makes me feel younger!” the blues continues on its way. interjects the 75-year-old Musselwhite.The simple mention of the word childhood had conjured up an almost intact picture 80