Every night across North America and around the world there are men and women who climb on to stages in dives, bars, honky-tonks, taverns, hotels, and anywhere else you can plug in an amplifier to play music. Some of them are just doing it for fun, and will soon fade away, not being able to stand the horrible hours, the bad money, and the inability to maintain stable relationships with any sort of ease.

Others will realize that this is as far as music will take them, that either from lack of talent or drive, they won't be escaping the bar circuit. They will either pack it in at that time, or they will continue to play weekend gigs for fun and because they still might hold on to a vestige of that dream that got them up on stage in the first place.

I'm not talking about dreams of fame and fortune, but something a lot simpler, but so much more complex as well. While the money and the material comforts that come with celebrity (not to mention someone to carry your equipment for you) would of course be welcome, what's even more compelling is that chance at immortality - to be remembered, not just by your family and friends, but by the world at large for doing what you loved.

What does it take to achieve that immortality? Talent, certainly; luck, most definitely, but neither one will be enough on their own. It takes that spark of greatness - indefinable, intangible, and indispensable, to lift a player from the crowd of players into the spotlight. But even that can be insufficient, unless that spark is captured at the perfect moment in time, it can flicker out as transient as a firefly on a summer's night.

The same ignition and fuel that fires that spark can lead to self-immolation if it burns unchecked and without respite. Such was the case for the talented and brilliant blues harmonica player William Clarke from Southern California. At the moment when his career was graduating from bars to venues his life was cut short in 1996 at the age of 45.

According to Will's late wife, Jeanette Clarke-Lodovici, he was already into the blues when they met and he was sixteen. He had started out as a drummer but had switched to harmonica and obviously felt he had found his passion.

[He] would practice for 8-10 hours a day locked in the bathroom. We were newlyweds and this was weird to me... I always thought he loved that harp more than me. I pretty much saw Bill evolve into a master on the harmonica. (Jeanette Clarke-Lodovici)

At this time it was the late sixties and in Los Angeles a lot of the old time blues and jazz musicians were still playing the clubs in the black ghettos where few whites would go. Will went and would play and listen, learning from some of the great musicians of the previous generation: Big Momma Thornton, Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, and George Smith.