Once in 1959 when I was singing in a Seattle coffeehouse, a guy asked for "The Wreck of the Sloop John B.," which I had learned four or five years before from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, so I sang it. He scowled all the way through it, and when I finished, he complained before the crowd, "You didn't sing it right!"

"Why?" sez I. "What's wrong with the way I sang it?"

"That's not the way the Kingston Trio sings it," he grumped.

"Of course not!" sez I, being quick of wit and noticing that the audience was following the exchange with interest. "There are three of them, and there's only one of me!"

Got a good laugh. But not from him

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Right about that same time, I was standing in the Folklore Center in the University District listening with Big John, the proprietor, to a recording of Win Stracke, a classically trained bass, singing folk songs to the accompaniment of Richard Pick's classic guitar. A guy who had hitchhiked up from California walked in lugging his guitar case, and stood there for a few minutes listening with us. Then he went into wall-eyed fits, shouting that "That opera singer has absolutely no right to sing those songs! Those are folk songs! And he's an opera singer—" and blatatta blatatta blatatta. Then, with steam pouring out his ears, he stomped out of the shop and headed up the street.

Apparently he was unaware that the "opera singer" he objected to so strenuously was one of the co-founders of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.

Don Firth

P. S. By the way, Eve, did you hear that Rene Descartes stopped in at a McDonald's and ordered a Big Mac. The kid in the paper hat asked him, "Do you want fries with that?" Descartes answered, "I think not." And vanished!