One of the factors that first got me actively interested in folk music in the early 1950s was that I was keeping steady company with a lovely young woman whose grandmother had given her a fine old parlor guitar which she no longer played, and she set about avidly teaching herself how to play it while learning folk songs and ballads from John and Sylvia Kolb's A New Treasury of Folk Songs and John and Alan Lomax's Best Loved American Folk Songs. Her name was Claire Hess.

She thought her name was not particularly euphonious. "Claire Hess!" she would say. "Plunk Plunk! I'm going to be sure to marry a man with a last name that's two syllables at least!"

I found this a bit disturbing because it occurred to me that "Claire Firth" would not be that great an improvement. Some time later, we parted company. Amicably, fortunately. Our lives simply took us in different directions.

Some time later, I heard that she had married a man named Jerry Huff.

Don Firth