Phil, your experience (23 Sep 14 - 04:35 PM) sounds pretty similar to my own. My girlfriend at the time had inherited a nice old parlor guitar from her grandmother and she was busily learning songs from a paperback song book entitled "A Treasury of Folk Songs" and Lomax's "Best Loved American Folk Songs." She was having so much fun with it that I bought myself a cheap guitar and got her to show me some chords.

There was a local folk singer on television at the time (this was around 1952) named Walt Robertson, who gave an informal concert at a nearby restaurant. She and I went. That evening Walt sang for about two-and-a-half or three hours. All traditional folk songs. Some of them I had heard before (Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Susan Reed), others for the first time.

I was totally enthralled! As was everyone there.

I thought, "I want to do that!"

After a long think, I changed my major at the University of Washington to Music (fastest way to learn what I wanted to know), started seriously taking guitar lessons (classical), and took a course in the U. of W. English Department in "The English and Scottish Popular Ballad." And I read a lot. And collected books by the Lomaxes, Carl Sandberg, Cecil Sharp, Evelyn Kendrick Wells, others….

Since then, I've sung on educational television, commercial television, concerts both at large venues (once, an audience of over 6,000) and at house concerts, at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962, several nights a week for many years in coffee houses (for decent pay), at folk festivals, at a Sail and Chantey Festivals…. Not just for "folkies," but for general audiences. And maybe thousands of "hootenannies" and "sing-arounds.")

I do sing a few songs that are not traditional folk songs, but the vast majority of my repertoire consists of traditional British and American folk songs and ballads. I know the histories and backgrounds of the songs and generally include brief verbal "background notes" in my programs.

I accompany my singing with an unamplified classical guitar and use a stage microphone only when the venue deems it necessary. I never, ever, before an audience of any kind, sing from songbooks, sheet music, or written notes.

I do not like Bob Dylan or much of his music. I take a very dim view of singers (and there are many of them) who work their asses off (and often ruin their voices) trying to sound "folk," and one write songs, sometimes very good songs, but insist that they are "folk songs" when the ink is still wet on the paper. Asinine! I do like Tom Paxton, Townes Van Zandt, and a number of others who write good songs, but don't try to claim they are "folk songs."

Urban born and raised, I am not, strictly speaking, a member of "the folk," as defined by Gottfried von Herder, the German philosopher who first used the term in relation to music and song ("volkslieder"—music of the rural, peasant class). I consider myself more in the tradition if a minstrel or troubadour.

Okay, gang. Start throwing those rotten vegetables….

Don Firth