/////Apparently, when Johnny Ace was doing his thing, I was busily practicing my first guitar chords and learning songs out of A Treasury of Folk Songs by John and Sylvia Kolb and The American Songbag by Carl Sandburg, and from the records of Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Susan Reed, and Cynthia Gooding.

You've heard of them, josepp?////

Not Reed or Gooding. Then again, I might. My older brother was a folkie when I was just a tyke and I grew up hearing all kinds of folk stuff. My oldest sister too. It's a large universe. Someone here mentioned sea songs and chanteys, I have a lot of those too--Johnny Collins, A.L. Lloyd, John Townley, The Boarding Party, etc. So I'm still discovering the folk universe. Burl Ives was probably the first one I ever heard. I remember hearing "Blue Tail Fly" when I was very, very young. But I also remember the Rooftop Singers from around that same period.

//////Josepp - I have been teaching for 10 years - 100 percent pass mark for all exams across singing guitar and bass. I teach flamenco guitar - jazz and blues piano - singing - bass - acoustic and fingerstyle - flat picking = rock and blues guitar and musicianship. I am not employed by anyone so if people do not like me they vote with their feet - that to me is the acid test////

But if some kid wants to play blues guitar, do you teach him a bunch of Jimmy Page licks or do you teach him about, say, John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters? Hopefully, the latter two. Not that there is anything wrong with Jimmy Page but if he wants to learn blues he needs to be learning about the men who founded it and made people like Page want to play it. Sure, teach him some Clapton stuff--nothing wrong with that--but he needs a real background in blues to understand blues. When I studied blues, I bought books and read articles on sharecropping. I felt that an understanding of blues required an understanding of the conditions that spawned it. It was eye-opening.

And while I am not totally opposed to teaching online, I am skeptical of its effectiveness. How does a student know when he is doing it right without a teacher right there to correct him? If he's having a problem executing, there's no teacher standing there to show him how to proceed. I've seen double bass lessons on youtube and they are worthless. You can't learn the bass that way. A real teacher is so critical that there is no point to learning without one. Guitar may not be quite that hard to learn but still...