The first time I ever actually performed in front of an audience was at a hospital in Denver. Before that, I had sung at parties and songfests, but never in a "me up here and the audience down there" situation. I expected maybe a couple dozen people at most, but when I walked into the hospital dining room where I was to perform, there were about 250.patients and staff waiting to hear me. I was bloody petrified! When I started off, my hands were shaking so badly that I had to abandon my carefully worked out guitar accompaniment and simply thumb-strum. But when I finished the song, they burst into applause. It suddenly occurred to me that they weren't going to lynch me after all! By the time I was into my third song, I was having fun!

That was something of a turning point. It went over well with the audience, and after the initial nervousness, I enjoyed the experience so much that I gave serious consideration to taking it up as a career, which I soon did, with some measure of success. I never got rich and famous, but I became fairly well-known locally and I made a halfway decent, if not lavish, living at it.

Although my repertoire consists almost entirely of traditional songs, I don't style myself as a "folk singer" as much as a performer or entertainer (Richard Dyer-Bennet didn't consider himself to be a folk singer;   he billed himself as "The Twentieth Century Minstrel."). And as a performer, I feel that if an audience is going to pay good money to hear me, I'd better give them their money's worth, or I won't be performing for long. That means that I practice and prepare for performances.

I haven't totally lost my nervousness before a performance, but it has lost its negative aspect and morphed into my being generally keyed-up and eager to get started. How much the nervousness predominates over the eagerness seems to be directly proportional to how well practiced and prepared I am. I can wing it, but I much prefer to know what the heck I'm doing before I go on.

My sister Pat was a world-class figure skater back in the Fifties. She won two Pacific Coast Championships and one National Championship, and she skated in the World Figure Skating Championships in Vienna (in 1955, if I remember correctly) where she placed seventh behind skaters like Tenley Albright and Carol Heiss. Anyway, my baby sister gave me a piece of advice that I heeded, and it has served me well. She said, "Nothing is going to go exactly as you planned. You can count on something going wrong when you least expect it, and you have to be able to compensate for it. You need to be about 30% better than you think you will need to be to do as well as you should."

With me, that would be a string that refuses to stay in tune, or my right hand fingernails are a little too long or short, or I develop a tickle in my throat that I have to sing over so I won't burst into a coughing fit in the middle of the third verse. . . .   You've all been there, I know. That translates into practice and preparation.   

But as far as I'm concerned, there are darned few experiences in life that can compete with delivering a good performance, getting a big round of applause when you finish—and then getting paid for it! I love it!!

Don Firth