Although I had heard Burl Ives on the radio and had seen Susan Reed in a movie, my first experience with live folk singing was in the very early 1950s when the girl I was "going steady" with at the University of Washington developed an active interest in folk songs, got herself a copy of A Treasury of Folk Songs compiled by John and Sylvia Kolb, was given a marvelous old parlor guitar by her grandmother who no longer played, and set about teaching herself. I bought myself a cheap guitar and just for the casual fun of it, joined in her endeavors.

One evening the two of us heard Walt Roberson in an informal concert in a basement restaurant in Seattle's University District. Walt held forth for close to three hours, like a minstrel of days gone by, singing songs and ballads and spinning tales, and generally held Claire and me, and the rest of the audience of maybe seventy-five people, completely enthralled for nearly three hours!

I was so taken by this experience that someplace during that evening I decided "I want to do that!" To sing songs like the ones Walt was singing, and that Claire and I were both learning—and to hold an audience as enthralled as the two of us, and the rest of the audience that night, had been.

I seem to have been fairly successful at it because even if I didn't get rich and famous, I did manage to make a living at it.

Folk Singer versus Entertainer?

I have never separated the two ideas.

Don Firth