A bunch of us used to sit around attempting to play this music that the black people were having such success with.I remember at the time I was dabbling with the soprano saxophone.My friend Burl Ives was a student of the flugelhorn,and of course Glen Yarborough was in the early stages of developing a unique clarinet style.We would listen to old recordings of Woody Guthrie and his famous warbling trumpet for hours.

Then one day this funny little Irish guy named O'Connell comes in to a club where we were playing and he's got this odd instrument he invented that looks like a snare drum impaled on a long stick.He chimed in on West Side Blues with this thing and the crowd went wild.I asked him what it was and he said it was a "band-joe", and I began to tinker with it.Well, the rest is history.The boys and I picked up several of these exotic stringed instruments and found their slower,folksy pace matched our slow, folksy demeanors. Pretty soon,everyone was calling this "Folk" music and the name just stuck.