One sunny day in June of 1979, a twenty-two year-old Frenchman waited in the airport lounge of Orly Airport, near Paris, for a plane that would take him to the United States. In his hand Bertrand Laurence carried his beloved acoustic guitar. In his body he carried the genes of an African grandfather, who had been a lion tamer and wrestler in a circus. In his heart he carried the blessings of his father and his uncle, a Gypsy guitar-player in Paris' Quartier Latin. And in his head he carried the music of American blues music that had grabbed him as a child and never let go.

In Laurence's childhood home in Normandy, the album Ray Charles at Newporthad often revolved on the stereo, along with albums by Jelly Roll Morton and other American blues and soul artists. Eight yearold Laurence, entranced by the liveliness and exuberance of the music, played the albums over and over. "This is why I'm into music," Laurence explains now. "When there was music was the only time I was happy in that household."

The blues were big in France thenhad been, in fact, since American soldiers brought in the music after World War II, and American bluesmen like Champion Jack Dupree, Memphis Slim and Big Bill Broonzy toured Europe and recorded there. Arthur Smith's "Guitar Boogie" was a mega-hit when Laurence was growing up. "Just two acoustic guitars," he recalls, "but it sounded so full. And all these French people would jitterbug as if their lives depended on it."

One day, when he was fifteen, Laurence opened the front door to find his aunt standing there holding a guitarfor him. "When I figured out blues chords it was all over," he says. "For a year I played blues in E every day." Practising alone in the garage after everyone was asleep, Laurence learned Big Bill Broonzy tunes and (from the recording of Frenchman Marcel Dadi) the fingerpicking styles of Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Doc Watson, and Jerry Reed.

Like many young guitarists, Laurence spent time in a rock band. ("For a couple of years I thought I was Keith Richards.") But even the Rolling Stones, he notes, grounded their music in acoustic blues. And he wanted to get to the source of that music and so he left France for America, to study in Boston at the Berklee College of Music.