THE FRETS were the house band at the Gate Of Horn folk club in Chicago for their Hootenannys on Sunday afternoons in 1959. That group consisted of John Carbo (banjo), Louis McDonald (conga drum) and Jim Roger McGuinn (guitar). They never made a record. We tossed a concert at the University Of Illinois-Chicago (Navy Pier campus)in Dec. of 59 or early 1960 with Frank Hamilton doing a solo show---and he brought THE FRETS with him as an opening act. Frank and Pete Seeger had just recorded their duo album called NONESUCH on Folkways Records and Frank did an instrumental solo guitar version of the Russian song "MEADOWLANDS" that night for which superlative would be a much too mild word with which to describe it. Always thought Frank's solo version was way better than the duet record. I taped that concert that night after hauling my 50 pound Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder all the way out into Lake Michigan at the end of Navy Pier. And it was more than worth it! I've still got parts of Frank Hamilton's show that he did 46 years ago. His "Railroad Blues" ("I'm gonna sit right here and look a million miles away...") -- done with harmonica the way Woody Guthrie taught him to play it---was also a highpoint of that concert. Right away I learned "MEADOWLANDS" from that tape. Then I worked out "Stars And Stripes Forever" and just one or two instrumentsl verses of the Christmas song, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". I played that as a protest instrumental medley all through the Cold War and the Viet Nam era.

Frank, thank you!!!

Art