I was a weird teen-ager I guess (the pop music of the times was okay, but it never really rang my chimes), and somewhere along the line I developed an interest in opera. A friend of mine had a big collection of records by Beniamino Gigli, a great Italian lyric tenor of yesteryear. My friend and I used to go around blatting tenor arias. Turns out he was a tenor, but my voice was very low (not unlike mooman's inspiration), so I had to sing the damned things an octave down. Actually, I turned out to be bass or bass-baritone (Ezio Pinza, Nicolai Ghiarov, George London. Samuel Ramey. Rumble rumble!). We both took about a year's voice lessons from Edna Bianchi, a retired Metropolitan Opera soprano. Cool lady! She was quite tolerant of a couple of goofy kids and was pleased that we were even interested. I had no idea what I would ever do with it, but I just liked the lessons and I liked to sing. Turned out I had a pretty good singing voice, but not necessarily a good operatic voice. Maybe, if I really wanted to work at it, but. . . .

Anyway, that was when I was about eighteen. In my second year at the University of Washington, I started going with a girl who was avidly into folk songs. At the same time, I ran into Sandy Paton, who was living in Seattle at the time, Walt Robertson (click "Printer Friendly" to put posts in sequence), Dick Landberg, and several others who were heavily into folk music. Walt, who had a television show at the time and a Folkways record coming out, was the only "professional" of the bunch. I still loved to sing, so naturally I jumped in with both feet, and got myself a guitar and started learning how to play it.

The first real influence on the way I sang folk songs was Claire, the girl I was going with at the time. She had a pleasant, sweet singing voice and she just opened her mouth and sang. She didn't try to make her voice sound like anything other than what it was. Walt sang the same way. So did everybody else I know, so that's the way I did it. I just opened my yap and whatever came out was what came out.   

I listened to a lot of recordings, and Burl Ives and Pete Seeger seemed to sing the same way. Richard Dyer-Bennet had classical training, of course, but even though I had also, I didn't sound particularly classical, at least as far as I could tell. People used to tell me that I sounded like Ed McCurdy. I didn't particularly think so myself. I figured they told me that because McCurdy was one of the very few folk singers with a deep voice available on records at the time.

When I decided that I wanted to see if I could make a career out of singing folk songs (concerts and such, like Burl Ives [pre-"Little Bitty Tear" and "Little White Duck"] or Richard Dyer-Bennet), I took some more voice lessons from George Hotchkiss Street. He knew I wanted to do folk music, and he never tried to influence my voice in one way or the other. He agreed that the way I sounded naturally was the best way to go, and all he did was work on my breath control and relaxed voice production. During the lessons, he had me sing the folk songs and ballads that I was in the process of learning rather than the art songs he usually had students sing, and he would often ask me, "Now, what is this song all about? What does that last line mean?" He knew perfectly well, but he just wanted to make sure that I knew. Know what you're singing. Don't overdo it, but put some feeling into the song.

It wasn't until later that I started running into what I think of as "ethnic purists":   singers who knocked themselves out trying to sound "folk" by adopting phony accents or deliberately altering their singing voices to sound raspy or nasal, and generally much older than they really were. That's one of the reasons that, even though a lot of folkies regard him as some kind of god, I was never that enthralled with Bob Dylan. He wrote some good songs, but when a guy who sounds like he's eighty years old, has trouble staying on pitch, and just rode into town with a load of parsnips is actually eighteen or nineteen years old, and when he just sang naturally (according to people who knew him in high school), he sounded a lot like Buddy Holly, it just struck me as phony. Sorry. Don't mean to step on anyone's idol, but as my drinking uncle used to say, 'Them's my sediments!"

These days, one of my favorite singers of folk songs is Gordon Bok. He sings without trying to sound any special way other than what he just naturally sounds like. His voice is rich, warm, and mellow, and he sings without strain or artifice. This frees his voice to be able to communicate a world of meaning and emotion to the songs he sings.

I've always tried to sing the same way. Within recent years, I've stolen a lot of songs from Gordon's recordings, and I can sing them in the same keys he does them in. But I don't try to imitate him, I do the songs my own way. Maybe it's because I sing a lot of his songs that now sometimes people tell me I sound like him. I'm not at all that sure that I do, myself. Actually, I don't think I'm that good. But anyway, it's nice to hear.

Don Firth