Yeah, Joe.

Bob and I met at a citywide hobby fair at the Hec Edmondson Pavilion at the University of Washington in 1953 when I was manning the booth of the newly formed Pacific Northwest Folklore Society (recently resurrected by Bob, Stewart Hendrickson, and me). Bob was sixteen, I was twenty-two. Later during the fair, Bob, Walt Robertson, and I sang one song each in our fifteen minute stint on the fair's performance stage.

Bob and I kept running into each other over the next few years, then, in 1959, a few months after a lovely young gal named Patti McLaughlin and I had done a series of television shows called "Ballads and Books" on the local PBS station, I got a regular three night a week gig at a Seattle's poshest coffeehouse, "The Place Next Door" (next door to the Guild 45th Theater – showed foreign and art films – and run by the same man). Nothing like having done a television series to give one a bit of "street cred" for getting gigs! Bob dropped in regularly and sang guest sets.

He mentioned that he had audio taped the sound tracks of the television series and had worked out some harmonies for some of the songs I did on the show. One night at "The Place," we tried a few of them on the audience.

It went over pretty well. Good audience response. Patti heard us and said that we gave her goose-bumps! In fact, the response was so good that we decided to try working together. This was okay with the fellow who ran "The Place." The results were pretty gratifying. We wound up being asked to do concerts, more television, all kindsa good gigs.

Figuring we were "ready for prime time," we headed for the Bay Area where all the West Coast activity seemed to be taking place. Hungry i, Purple Onion, lots of things going on in Berkeley. We spent a couple of months there, sang up a storm, met a lot of great people, and auditioned a few places. We found out that most of the clubs in San Francisco were actually tourist Meccas, and the Hungry i and the Purple Onion didn't actually want folk singers, they wanted comedy acts. Although they used folk songs as a base, The Kingston Trio's, The Limeliters', the Gateway Singers', et al "acts" consisted of a lot of clowning around and goofing with the songs. For example, we saw the Smothers' Brothers first professional gig at the Purple Onion. Compared to "acts" like these, Bob and I were a bit too "stuffy," I guess (we're not above clowning it up a bit, but we tend to take the songs seriously).

In Berkeley, there were coffeehouses. But unlike Seattle's coffeehouses, where we were paid regularly by the management, the Berkeley places tended to be "basket houses." You sang for tips. Also, the prevalent singing style in Berkeley seemed to be "thou shalt sound 'ethnic,'" as if you had just ridden into town on a turnip truck. Bob and I didn't try to act like anything we were not.

It seems that we were too "ethnic" for San Francisco and too "commercial" for Berkeley.

In Sausalito, however, as long as we sang good songs and sang them well, we were more than welcome. But there was only one place that paid and they were full up. That's were we met Juanita Montrond.

An older woman (60s maybe?), she was a semi-retired cabaret and night club singer who had a huge repertoire of Mexican folk songs which she sang in a rich contralto voice, to the accompaniment of her old, deep-toned Mexican guitar. She and her two young 'uns, Lola and Benny welcomed us vagabond troubadours into their home in the hills of Sausalito many evenings that we were there—and fed us lavishly. In addition to being a marvelous singer, Juanita was a magnificent cook. When Juanita, Lola, and Benny sing together, it was glorious!! Beautiful!

Although Bob and I did get a number of gigs, (oftentimes when the time came for us to be paid, the manager ducked out – more than once we had to chase him out the back door and down a dark alley, and tackle him to make him pay us what he promised), we eventually ran out of money. As much fun as we were having there, we were forced to concluded that, financially, we had been better off in Seattle.

When we returned to Seattle, Bob had to set about making a living (also, he was soon to get married) as did I, and I wanted to enroll in the Cornish College of the Arts (a sort of conservatory), where I could take more music classes and where, unlike the U. of W. School of Music, they didn't look down on someone who wanted to sing folk songs and ballads. So we let the duo go. But we kept singing together from time to time, and still do.

A bit longer in the tooth, but we can still manage to wheeze out a song or two.

Don Firth

Don Firth