The music was always around. My dad sang me "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" as a lullaby and I still have the Carl Sandburg, Sam Hinton, Weavers 78s my parents bought. But out of a lot of golden memories there are two very special ones.

1. Some time in 1959 or 1960 Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee did a concert in Portland OR. I don't remember the concert, but afterward they and I went home with Mel Lyman and I spent the rest of the night learning about the blues from Brownie and getting drunk on Mel's homebrew.

2. In 1964 or 1965 Pete Seeger did a concert with the SNCC Singers at Searsville Lake near Stanford University. It was open air, a meadow surrounded by oaks. All Seeger concerts are peak experiences for me, but this was the biggest and singingest group of all. We and Pete kept on singing after they turned off the lights, after they turned off the sound system...