"In those days, as now, there was a persistant bias among classical players against any other style of music."

I got that a lot when I was at the University of Washington School of Music. A couple of my profs knew what I was all about and backed me all the way, but from some profs and students both, I got a lot of "When are you going to stop messing around with that cowboy music and get serious?" I just smiled sweetly and went my own way.

But I was pretty lucky with my first classic guitar teacher, a fellow with the oddly rural name of Joe Farmer. Joe played both classic and jazz, and did a little recording studio work as well. He didn't do folk music himself, but he was familiar with Richard Dyer-Bennet, he had heard a lot of Pete Seeger, and it seems that in the very early 50s, Ed McCurdy had passed through Seattle, and he and Joe spent quite a bit of time together. So Joe kept me plugging away on classic technique, but he knew what I was all about. Good teacher.

Don Firth