The pump was primed by my mother when I was a preschooler in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late '50s. We listened twice a week to "Festival of Song," a live show with a studio audience produced by the University of Michigan radio station. That's where I absorbed loads of folksongs -- from "Marching to Pretoria" to "Skye Boat Song" to "The Ash Grove" and many others. She bought me a Folkways record by a group called the Folksmiths. (One member of that group, Joe Hickerson, became my husband many years later.) She played me that and many other records of folksongs.

In 1969, I spent some magical summer time at Camp Keewano ("place of the eagle, by the water, under the moon") in Newaygo, Michigan. All our counselors were deeply embroiled in the "folk scare," and campfire singarounds were full of songs learned from the Kingston Trio, Weavers, PP&M, Bob Dylan, etc. I bought a baritone ukelele and kept singing when camp ended.

However, the serious love affair with folk -- the irrevocable "switch flipping" never-turn-back event -- was hearing Sandy and Caroline Paton for the first time in 1970 in a concert they gave at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They introduced me to a whole world of friends, musicians, and songs that have been the mainstay of my life for the past 30 years. (AND they rescued me from Grand Rapids and Calvinism, a true good deed -- just ask Big Mick!) Long live Folk-Legacy, Sandy, & Caroline! Kathy