You know, sports fans, if you just want to sing folk songs and ballads (or put tunes to dirty limericks), and accompany them on the guitar, ukulele,or autoharp, you don't really need to know any of this stuff. Just tune your instrument to a halfway decent pitch-pipe or an electronic tuner (preferable), do your thing, and let the nit-pickers go ahead and argue in the corner.

My first instruction on the guitar was from my girlfriend at the time, Claire, who had inherited her grandmother's old Washburn "Ladies' Model" parlor guitar (made 1898) and was teaching herself out of Guckert's Chords for Guitar without Notes or Teacher. Claire could read music, but she used the chord book because she was a college student and didn't have any spare money to spend on lessons. When I got my guitar (Regal "El Cheapo" model) I also bought the Guckert's chord book and the salesman tossed in the Nick Manoloff book and the Chord Wheel for free. THAT was a real help.

A couple of years later, when I knew maybe forty songs (learned from Lomax's Folk Song U.S.A., Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, and Cecil Sharp's 100 English Folk Songs, along with a growing record collection) and people started hiring me to sing, I figured, "If I'm going to do this professionally, I'd better learn something about music." Which is when I started taking lessons, and later enrolled in the U. of Washington's School of Music.

Maybe I haven't set the world on fire, but I've made a halfway decent living from singing traditional folk songs and ballads since the mid-1950's, and thoroughly enjoyed myself in the process.

And all with my guitar (I've had several very good Spanish-made classical guitars since I retired the $9.95 Regal apple crate) tuned in equal temperament.

Nobody in my audiences complained about my guitar not being tuned in pure intonation in all that time!*

Don Firth

*By the way, since none of the guitars I've owned have movable frets, I'm not really sure how I could do that.