Great idea, Smokey! David should try busking.

Burl Ives, in his early autobiography, Wayfaring Stranger (actually, he wasn't that old when he wrote it), describes how he was in New York, studying voice at a music conservatory with the idea of becoming an art singer. He was taking regular singing lessons and trying to wrap his tongue around German, so he could sing lieder.

But he was feeling kind of homesick, and he would often pull out his guitar and sing a few of the songs he had learned from his grandmother. Some of the music students he shared a house with tended to sneer at the songs, so one Sunday afternoon, he took his guitar and went to a nearby park so he could be alone. He sat on a park bench and sang to himself. A few kids dropped by to listen to him. They liked the songs, so he sang to them. Gradually the crowd got bigger and bigger and soon there were several dozen people, children and adults, standing there or sitting on the grass listening to him and applauding each song. He sang to them for a couple of hours.

That evening, he lay on his bed staring at the ceiling and mulled over what had happened that afternoon. "Why am I wearing myself out learning a lot of songs that are difficult to learn, difficult to sing, and are foreign to me when I already know a couple of hundred songs that I learned from my grandmother and from my friends and family?"

That was when Burl Ives decided to abandon the effort to become a lieder singer and devote himself to singing folk songs and ballads. Concerts, radio programs, club dates, and records followed quickly. And for several years—before Pete Seeger and The Weavers, and a bunch of other folk singers appeared on the national scene—if you mentioned folk music, most people thought of Burl Ives.

Burl Ives found his true career by chance. And by the response of the people who heard him in his impromptu afternoon park concert. He wasn't "busking," he just wanted to go and sing to the squirrels. But people heard him, stayed to listen, and liked what he did.

Things went sour for him later, but that's another story.

That's a good way to really learn if you have it or not. Sing for people who are perfectly free to walk away if they wish, and see what kind of response you get.

Don Firth