But at Berklee no one was interested in acoustic blues, and, disappointed, Laurence concluded it was a dead art form, available only on college radio programs. So he turned his artistic sensibilities to performance art, making tapes of instruments and street soundsbicycles, bulldozers, the voices of homeless peopleand layering them into collages of sound. For several years he composed for Boston's Mirage Mime Company and New York performance art companies, while his acoustic guitar collected dust in a corner.

But the blues were only waiting for rediscovery. When he became a counselor at the Pine Street Inn, Boston's largest homeless shelter, the men in his care would sing in the shower, and he started bringing in his plastic Ovation guitar to accompany them. In the process he rediscovered the power of the blues. "If you don't get the blues in a shelter, you'll never get it," he says. Soon he discovered that many of the men were talented singers and songwriters, and he began putting together concerts featuring them, including one on the Boston Common. From the stage, playing guitar behind the singers, he watched the audience's reaction. "I could see stereotypes crumbling as people were moved by the songs," he recalls. Eventually he collected performances of songs and poems by homeless men into a video, Voices from a Shelter for Men.

These experiences brought him back to his first love. "It was a lifelong dream of mine to come to the U.S. and play blues with the real bluesmen of the South," he says. "I never imagined it would happen in a shelter." In a storage room at Pine Street, full of mattresses, religious statues and other donated items, Laurence had created a music space for the men to come and sing, and one day a black man from Mississippi joined him there. As the man sang one blues song after another, Laurence added his acoustic guitar to the sound. And then the realization hit him: "I came to the States to play the blues. This is it."

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