For me, its the little things, the one-on-one interactions with people. We play at the Folklife Festival in Seattle every year, and most of time someone comes up after our set who has never heard anything like that before and is all turned on by finding a whole new genre of music to explore.
    Another time, we were playing a Bulgarian tune at a gig in the women's handbag department of the the Bon Marche (the local department store) and an elderly Bulgarian woman came up and told us she had danced to that tune as a child. It was quite an emotional experience for her hearing it in the middle of a store in downtown Seattle. Her reaction became quite an emotional experience for me.
    One time an audience member struck up a conversation after we played at a local coffee house. In the course of the conversation, he said something like, "It must feel good to you to have achieved such a level of mastery on your instruments." I've never felt really great about my level of instrumental mastery, but it felt pretty good damn good to hear a total stranger refer to it in an off-hand, matter-of-fact way.
    Every once in a while someone asks me for guitar or cittern lessons because they want to learn to play just like me. I don't very often take on students, and when I do they don't usually last very long once they understand the amount of theory they need to learn in order to figure out how I figure out what I'm doing. But it feels nice to be asked.
    There are numerous stories like this from 22 years of playing folk music in the same town. It gives me a warm glow every time. The other thrill is that every year I get two or three royalty checks from tunes of mine that have been recorded by others and from a book that an actual publisher agreed to publish for me. It's never enough money to make me feel rich, but it's enough to take a few friends out to a really fancy restaurant, or to pay for a B&B for the weekend for my wife and I. It's fun, and it gives me something to brag about.

John Peekstok