In the first in a series of guest columns, FDM.com talks to a number of musicians about their instrument of choice and finds out precisely what it is that keeps them return time and again to their tried and trusted musical companion.

This week Roy Rieck from the Medley Band talks exclusively to FDM.com about why Harp-playing remains such a treasured old pursuit...

"Harmonica is like them mean ol' gals," Terry 'Harmonica' Bean once told me, "the kind you don't find - it finds you. "

I knew he was right, I just didn't know why. At the time I was too preoccupied with the fact that it was the dead of the night, Terry was dead drunk, and we'd been driving for the last hour in what seemed to be a darkened by-road somewhere in the Mississippi. Yet I trusted my appointed mentor in all things related to the field of mouth organs (it was his drunken driving that I questioned). Not because he was nicknamed "harmonica" nor because he was - as was written in his business card - the only living black blues harp player in the Delta.

"You know them gals?" asked Terry, "Pretty as hell, they are. Take you for a ride and wooooohh... you're saved..."

I nodded and smiled. Terry examined me through eyes swollen with alcoholic adversity. "You don't know them gals..." he muttered while bringing the van into a halt.

He was right about that as well. I didn't know them gals. But I wanted to be taken for a ride, I wanted to be saved. And the harmonica did that, in her pretty as hell way - dragging me from one edge of the world to the other, for the promise of a swift sweet and soft kiss at some point; chugging and stomping our way, scaring off unpleasant people at unpleasant streets in unpleasant hours, scoring us free smiles and free drinks every where we went; and then vanishing without even telling, without a hint as to when will she ever be back.

"I'll tell you what - they ain't be saving you!" Terry yelled back at me while I was following him towards a much discomforting patch in the woods that the pick up lights pointed at. Mosquitoes drowned in my sweat. "And 'for you know it, they long gone... and the next time you be seeing them, they're rubbing up against some other fella..."

Before we reached that point of being muddled from cheap whiskey and Terry declaring we're off to a nightly road-trip that would make me a better harmonica player, I was escorting him to a "private" gig he had in Greenwood, which meant playing a one hour set in a hotel to a group of over-weight tourists from somewhere in the US where they grow groups of over-weight tourists. Which meant it would end up with a thick-glasses-big-belly-Hawaiian-shirt-tucked-in-khaki-shorts-socks-stretched-up-to-the-knee kind of guy that pulls out a fancy harp case and wants to jam. And that never ends up well.

"And them fellas - we ain't better then them. All wanting to be saved..." He stopped and signaled me to come closer to where he was standing. It was a grave. The pick up lights disfigured the letters engraved on the stone, so I had to kneel down and look closely. It was Sonny Boy Williamson's grave. Bewildered, I looked up at Terry, as he pulled out from his pocket a tiny four-holed harmonica, the kind you buy at toy stores, laced in a show string with what Terry described as Voodoo beads given to him by his old man (it had Christian engravings, I didn't say a thing).

"We'll put here for the night." Terry hanged the Harmonica necklace on the edge of the grave. "And 'ol Sonny Boy here is gonna take good care of it... And you -" he pointed at me with an austere look, "you better wear it every good damn gig you play!"

"And then I'll play better?" I asked, glazed with joy.

"Nope," Terry responded quickly without even looking at me, "but at least you'll have a story to tell." Then he veered off back to the truck, so sluggish all of a sudden, drained out of energy. "Them gals loves a good story..." he Mumbled to himself, as if I wasn't there, as if there was not one noisy cricket in the woods.

To find out more on Roy Rieck and The Memory Band click here: http://www.myspace.com/royrieck