Ron, I don't know what you mean by my "tradition." I was urban born into a middle class family in the early 1930s, grew up listening to all kinds of music (pop, classic, opera, country). In high school, I developed a taste for performing. I knew a lot of kids who were into music and drama, a few of whom went on to careers as singers and actors. In my first years in college, in 1952 or so, I met Walt Robertson, Sandy Paton, and a few others who were interested in folk music and I became interested myself, bought a guitar, and set about learning to play it. I learned songs from Walt and Sandy and from the few folk records that were available then, by singers such as Burl Ives, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Cynthia Gooding, and from song collections such as Sandburgs American Songbag and Lomax's Folk Song U.S.A. Meeting Pete Seeger in 1954 and Richard Dyer-Bennet a couple of years later were great enthusiasm builders, and I began getting paid to sing in the late 1950s. I was lucky enough to be called on to do a television series on folk music, as I mentioned above. Through the rest of the 50s and well into the 1960s, I made a fairly decent living singing in coffeehouses, doing concerts, folk festivals, and so on. I've detailed all of this a number of times elsewhere.

As to my "sound," I don't think I have a regional sound. Since people are willing to pay to hear me sing, I guess I must be a halfway decent singer (bass-baritone), and I'm a somewhat more than competent guitarist. I probably sound similar to singers such as Ed McCurdy and Gordon Bok. I sing a wide variety of songs, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and American songs, from Appalachian ballads to California mining songs to Pacific Northwest lumbering songs, to sea chanteys to—whatever happens to appeal to me. And in aid of doing the songs well, I try to learn as much about them—histories, backgrounds, the people who sang them, and why—as I can. I'm fairly good with accents and dialects whenever it seems appropriate, which is an aid in doing songs from different traditions and locales, and although some people here on Mudcat consider that sort of thing phony and reprehensible, my audiences don't seem to mind, and I do not try to make them think that I am anything but what I am.

So I'm a urban-born singer-guitarist who sings mostly (but not exclusively) traditional songs and ballads learned from song books and recordings, and I imagine I sound something like Gordon Bok on an off day.

I don't know if that helps or not.

Don Firth

P. S. I hope to have a CD of my own out in the near future. Working on it. In fact, I learned quite a bit from Melissa about doing a CD, including a few things not to do (not speaking artistically, but in a business sense).