Home from freshmen year at college for Thanksgiving vacation in 1961, I went to the Second Fret with my girlfriend (now wife), my college roommate and a local girl I had fixed him up with (this did not, however, lead to much as my roommate left Georgetown the next year to attend the seminary). Headliner that night was Lightnin' Hopkins, who had just begun to surface to the broader public a year earlier when he debuted at Carnegie Hall on October 14, 1960, with Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. A Philadelphia TV station had broadcast a show that week in 1961 featuring Hopkins and Baez...each singing separately against a black background one after the other for an hour. There was no talking, just singing. The contrast of style and singer could not have been more stark...or more wonderful in an era when folk and blues were beginning to merge. That night at the Second Fret with Hopkins just a few feet away playing (to a bunch of white college kids for the most part) was a night I have often thought about over the last 53 years and one of those moments a person can savor and think, "I was there."