You might want to scroll past this one: I have a feeling it's gonna be long.

My family's Saturday evening entertainment was listening to the radio--a couple of family dramas ("One Man's Family"?), then a comedy show called "It Pays to Be Ignorant," and finally, "Your Hit Parade." Frank Sinatra was the male vocalist on the show, which featured the top ten songs of the week, ten down to one. I grew up singing pop songs.

I'm a preacher's son (no, Joe, not a priest's) and my mom sometimes played piano in church, if the organist was off, and often played at home, the whole family and any guests there may have been leaning in to try to see the words of the songs she played, Christmas carols, Stephen Foster songs (but it wasn't until a couple of months ago when I began learning the loveliest, "Hard Times Come Again No More"). My older sister had piano lessons, my older brother had trumpet lessons (and later taught himself piano), my younger brother played trombone--my parents started me on violin and the evening of the day that my teacher told me to lighten up on the strings, after about a month's lessons, my mom--in tuning the violin--broke the bridge. A new one would cost $.50, a huge sum in the late thirties, and my parents, having heard me practice before my latest lesson, decided it was better for the whole family if my lessons ceased. The violin (and an old round bodied mandolin died years later, neglected and abused, in the garage, its bow long since losing its hair to ill conceived attempts to play musical saw.

In my mid teens there was talk about buying me a clarinet, then a month or so of piano lessons, then a decision that I wasn't a musician. Then my older brother, Dave, came back from college with a ukulele, playing "Ain't She Sweet" and other such. When I started college there was a guy in the dorm who played "Keep on the Sunny Side" on a uke, singing a very unspiritual chorus: "Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, keep on the sunny side of life; you will feel no pain as I drive you insane, so keep on the sunny side of life." Between choruses, he'd tell very dumb jokes. The girls loved him. At that time I linked making music with success with girls and tried to imitate some of the songs Dave played on the uke. I went into the air force toward the end of the Korean war, after which I finally bought my own ukulele, a Martin soprano on which I learned to play a few dozen songs (badly). To amplify my unlistenable music, I bought a very bad tenor banjo, replaced the steel strings with nylon, and tuned it like a uke.

Possibly because I was so lousy, no one ever seemed to want to play with me, so I had no models and never got better, even after buying my first guitar, a very nice--and for me, very expensive--Goya classic guitar. But I got away from the old uke tunes and actually started playing some folk songs at this time, "Look Down, Look Down That Lonesome Road" and "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" and such. But I got bad reviews from the audience the only time I tried to play it publicly, at an open mike in Fresno, and traded it in on my first 5-string, a very nice Bacon long neck, and got Seeger's book. The basic up picking technique was easy enough to learn, and soon I was double-thumbing melodies, hammering on and pulling off, choking and sliding a bit, "Hard, Ain't It Hard" and "John Henry" and "Waltzing Matilda" and "Whiskey in the Jar."

Another very long plateau, a lot of side trips into guitars and autoharps and harmonicas and so on, and finally, in the past three or four years, thanks to some friends into old timey songs, I started learning to frail, now trying to build up a bit of speed playing clawhammer melodic banjo, some three-finger style, and so on, and a sudden breakthrough a couple of years ago when I finally learned cross-harp style of blues, country, and folk harmonica...and still cursing about my mon's decision not to buy a new bridge for the fiddle.

--seed