I'm strolling the grounds at Rochelle Plantation, swatting mosquitoes and singing to myself, "Well, a young mannnnn ain't nuthin' in the world these days."  The song is "Young Man's Blues", and the man who wrote it is just across the lawn, finishing up a sound check for his performance at twilight. And he's not Pete Townsend. He is Mose Allison, Sage of Tippo and jazz/blues legend who, at seventy-nine, still tours for a good hundred and fifty days a year. I sure traveled a circuitous route to meet this guy, I think as he bounds off the stage and comes my way — trimmed white beard, high-dollar running shoes, sport jacket, ball hat — very dapper and decisive with his movements, alert and limber. As a child of the British Invasion, I'd heard his influence first on early Stones and Yardbirds;  then, without my realizing it, the outright covers. In college I listened to a Sunday night DJ who played lots of Mose, claiming he'd gotten the jump on progressive jazz bands like Weather Report and Return to Forever by at least a decade. Then came "Everybody's Crying Mercy" and "If You Only Knew," covers that sounded so Raitt and so Van it never occurred to me Mose had written them. And finally, the piano trios in nice restaurants when I landed that first well-paying job. No telling how much Mose I heard – covers, and covers of covers, such as Mose's lovely rendition of Dizzy Gillespie's "Strange."  Funny how someone can figure into your life without you knowing it, and, funnier still, how events can conspire to bring you together.

"You ready to do this, Mose?"

"Sure, man."

We step into the roomy plantation home where Mose takes a seat on a stuffed couch beneath a couple of Audubon originals. He asks me to sit facing his good ear, and for most of our brief conversation he poises his shoulders in a half-shrug, arms extended, rubbing his hands together. I notice that his hands aren't terribly large for a pianist, and when I mention it he says, "Yes, I have small hands, but I can achieve a tenth with some effort."  He raises his left hand and stretches his thumb and pinky as wide as they'll go and adds, "I shook hands with Bud Pyle once. He had big hands. Lenny Tristano had big, loose hands. Thelonious Monk had small hands. Bill Evans had long fingers."    

Mose began his musical career with piano lessons at age five, but lost interest when he realized he could learn more quickly through osmosis. By ten he was dropping lunch money into the school juke box, committing tunes to musical memory, then running home hungry to reproduce them on his father's piano. "You might have it all before you even get started," he told another interviewer, "It just takes a while to unravel because you're showing it to yourself."  A few years later he told yet another interviewer, "A bird can't sing his song unless he hears it. It's part genes and part means."  A glance at his childhood tells me he was blessed with both, beginning with his parents – Mose Sr., Mississippi gentry and a self-taught ragtime pianist, and Maxine, Miz Mose, a ukulele player and local columnist (Miz Mose's Musings) with a wicked sense of humor. Add to this formative mix the place itself, Tippo, Mississippi (pop. 200), sunk deep in the Delta, birthplace of the blues, coupled with this wonderful box, this juke box, located in the back of Papa Allison's service station, pipelining into Tippo the race records of Louis Jordan, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Roosevelt Sykes, and now young Mose has everything he needs to become who he always was — the jazz-blues legend sitting before me.