Mom:

The new guitar is sweet--it has that sort of rinkydink sound you used to hear in the 60's, before everyone started playing Martins, when nylon strings were often used by beginners and their stumbling efforts at "Freight Train" or "Babe, It Ain't No Lie" would ring out from their lonely bedrooms in the suburban nights and you were thirteen and glad to have any guitar at all and the high-schoolers didn't understand and kept swooning over Buddy and Elvis, but you knew that the real cool was those old Leadbelly and Weavers and Burl and so you kept on practicing and learning to play Freight Train, and it was almost all good. That kind of sound, an unpretentious Spanish acoustic from Korea named after an American moutain range.

In the case were two music books. One of them had, bound into it, a tear-out page with a pop-out vinyl record in it labeled 33 1/3!! It has chords and tuning lessons on it, I think. I amm nnot going to take it out from its original binding.   The music books sold for $2.95 each and came from the store in a hwite paper back with green printing on it that showed notes floating around, and a person with glasses smiling, and the slogan, "Music is for Everybody!" It reminded me of an earlier, more innocent time.

I'm not saying a better time, but certainly earlier, and a lot more innocent.


A