World-renowned harmonica virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko on January 31, 1944, and lived there with his family at the corner of North and Wells streets until they moved to Memphis in the fall of 1947, when he was three. His great uncle, Lamar Coalson, once owned the store that occupied this site. Attracted to the blues as a teenager in Memphis, Musselwhite learned guitar and harmonica and sought out blues singers he had read about in The Country Blues by Sam Charters, who later produced his debut album. Will Shade, Furry Lewis, and Memphis Willie B. Borum became his first mentors. In November 1962 Musselwhite moved to Chicago in search of employment, first settling in the Uptown area, then becoming immersed in the African American music and lifestyle of the South Side and moving there in 1964 to be closer to the blues. In 1963-64 he also roomed at the Jazz Record Mart and the Old Wells Record Shop with Big Joe Williams. Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Big Walter Horton, Magic Sam, and other former Mississippians in Chicago became close friends, and Musselwhite later cited Horton, Williams, Homesick James, and John Lee Granderson as the bluesmen who taught him the most while also acknowledging Little Walter and Robert Nighthawk as major influences. As his reputation grew in the blues clubs, Sam Charters invited him to record for the Vanguard label, and his 1967 album Stand Back! created such a stir that he relocated to the San Francisco area in August of that year. Although many white musicians had already adapted the blues into other styles, Musselwhite maintained a blues persona while exploring a variety of American and world music genres, and his trend-setting dedication to blues made him a role model, especially among harmonica players on the West Coast. Over the next four decades he toured the world, recorded some thirty albums, and earned many W. C. Handy Awards or Grammy nominations. A perennial winner of blues awards and polls, he received a Mississippi Governor's Award in 2000. He often returned to visit relatives in Kosciusko and the Delta, invested in property in Clarksdale after he began headlining blues festivals in the area in the 1990s, and when he and his wife, Henrietta, were married on January 26, 1981, in San Francisco, John Lee Hooker served as his best man.