This can be a serious problem for people who want to perform, so if you don't mind, I'll blither on at some length about what I've learned during my somewhat checkered career about nervousness and stage fright.

I can't say that I suffer from stage fright as a general rule. The first umpteen times I sang in front of other people were in a fairly "warm bath" situation:   "hoots," or songfests in private homes, and the response to my first fumblings was appreciation of my efforts, and encouragement. This helped a lot.

I'd been singing and playing the guitar for about three years and I'd developed a repertoire of some sixty or seventy songs when I first sang for a group larger than the capacity contents of someone's living room. I sang at a hospital, and I thought the group would be maybe a couple of dozen people. It turned out to be closer to 250, including patients, doctors, and various hospital personnel. This was a bit of a shock. When I sang my first song, I was so nervous my hands were shaking, and I fumbled a lot on the guitar, so instead of the sort of classic guitar accompaniment I usually did, I just thumb-strummed. When I got a good round of applause at the end of the song and realized that they weren't going to lynch me, this was exhilarating, so from then on, I was okay.

Nervousness really hit when a friend and I did a television series on folk music on our local educational channel (it's now the local PBS affiliate). This was in 1959, the days before videotape was widely in use, so the shows were live! Like GUEST,Quigs, before the show started, I found I had to make about six trips to the restroom down the hall from the studio. One does not generally need to drain one's bladder six times within half an hour. Sheer nerves! Fortunately the first show went exactly as planned, because I was mentally non-functional and operating on automatic.

Afterwards, I mentioned my petrified state to Sally, the producer. She assured me that it wasn't noticeable, and then she gave me a few tips. She reminded me that, although what I probably had in mind was that I was singing to thousands of people (an idea that can freeze a lot of people, as it nearly did me), I was actually singing to only one or two people at a time—whoever happened to be watching the show on any given TV set. "You aren't nervous singing in someone's living room, are you?" she asked. No. "Well," she said, "that's actually what you are doing. That's the way the television audience perceives you. Forget the 'thousands of people.' You're singing to just a couple of people in their living room."

Great advice! By the third show in the series, I felt like an old pro. I was aware of everything from the floor director's signals, to the big clock under the monitor telling me how far into the show we were and whether I should add or drop a few verses from the "rubber song" we had intentionally programmed late in the show for that purpose, and which of the three cameras was live, and the kind of shot Sally was trying to get—the works!

After the series was over, and because of the series, I was in demand (so I couldn't have been too gawdawful, I guess), and among other things, I took a regular three night a week engagement at "The Place Next Door," a sort of up-scale coffee house (more like a non-alcoholic night club). There is nothing like singing regularly like this to got over—or get through—stage fright. This was followed by more TV, concerts, other stuff.

I addition to what Sally, the KCTS-TV producer told me, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Dr. Stanley Chappelle, the dean of the University of Washington's School of Music. I'd started singing and playing when I was about twenty-two. I decided that I wanted to sing for a living if I could actually manage it, but my musical knowledge was next to zilch. I was sort of like someone who wanted to be a writer but knew little about spelling and grammar. So I decided to enroll in the U. of W. School of Music, but since my interest was folk music and my instrument was the guitar (at the time, not regarded as a "legitimate" musical instrument by some of the stuffier institutions), I had to audition for Dr. Chappelle. I was intensely nervous when I first started to play a classic guitar solo for him (shaking hands again). He stopped me, and we chatted a bit. He told me that the main reason that people get stage fright is that they are thinking more about what the audience thinks of them than they are about the music they're playing. I digested that, then tried again. I passed the audition.

What I have found out about myself is that when I start wondering what the audience is thinking of me, I get distracted and that's when I screw up. My favorite trick is forgetting the next line and having to sit there staring at the ceiling, hoping some sympathetic muse will quickly write the words up there. It precipitates the very thing I most want to avoid. Counterproductive.

I have to remember that it's not all about me. I'm merely the vehicle for the song.

And here's a major one:   be prepared. Know your material. My younger sister, Pat, who was a world-class figure skater during the Fifties, once told me, "Try to be about thirty percent better than what you think you need to be, because something will always go wrong." Yeah, that's about right. Nothing ever goes quite the way you wish it would (you break a fingernail or your guitar, banjo, harp, whatever refuses to stay in tune, something), so you have to just drill your way through.

Don Firth