Back in the early Sixties I sang quite a bit in a coffeehouse where there were often two, three, or four of us occupying the small stage any one time. We'd sit there in front of the audience and swap songs and wisecrack among ourselves and with the audience. It was almost like singing at a party (and getting paid for it), and the audiences loved it. Very informal, and one of the more enjoyable long-term gigs.

But there was one guy there who wasn't a half-bad musician, but he was lazy about digging up songs on his own. He liked my repertoire, and if he heard me sing a song more than two or three times, especially if it was a song I got a particularly good audience response with, he was hell-bent on learning it. He was sneaky about the whole thing, and got a couple of friends to sit in the audience and copy down the words for him as I sang. Actually, had he asked me straight out, I would have written them down for him.   Many of them I had learned simply by asking other singers if they would write out the words for me, and they had generously done so. They were mostly traditional songs, and I held by the principle that anyone who wanted to sing them should have free access to them. After all, they were not "my" songs. Still, it annoyed me that he seemed to regard me as his sole source of new songs, and he would knock himself out to try to sing them before I did (not unlike Clinton and his friends, apparently). No problem, however. I kept my set lists in my head, which made for easy revision, and I could sing about ten songs for every one that he knew.

But he managed to pull the rug out from under himself. Not only did he want to sing the songs I sang, he wanted to use my guitar accompaniments as well. But I'd studied quite a bit of classic guitar and he hadn't. Some of my accompaniments were pretty simple, but some were not. He'd sit there and watch me and try to figure out what I was doing. A week or so later he would spring the song, trying to do what I did on the guitar in a sort of abbreviated version, It would come off sounding kind of pale, especially if someone had heard me do it first, which many people in the audience had. Worst of all (for him), he insisted on doing the songs in the same keys that I did. But I'm a bass. His voice was higher than mine, so he'd growl along at the bottom of his vocal range, which didn't sound that great. Apparently it never occurred to him to capo up, but then it may be that since I didn't always use the standard chord the fingerings he was familiar with, he couldn't actually figure out what key I was in just by watching me. When he sang the songs that he'd learned and worked out on his own, he was pretty good, but when he did the ones he "gleeped" off of me, the overall results were often a bit less than thrilling.

The regulars in the audience tumbled quickly to what was going on, and some of them made a point of requesting those songs early in the evening and specifically from me. And they would ask him for songs that they knew he did, but that I didn't.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes it doesn't do much for the imitator.

Don Firth