"So I guess it is because professional musicians are greedy and WON'T make music part of their lifestyle preferring instead to live life as wandering juke boxes.

"I say we can do without them in that case."

You're not getting it, Conrad. First of all, one cannot become a professional musician unless the music they play is a major part of their "lifestyle." It's just simply impossible for it to be otherwise. And as far as your charge of selfishness and greed is concerned, do you whine about having to pay a doctor? Or a dentist? Or the grocery store when you buy a bagful of food? Or the restaurant when you go out to eat? Or that you have to pay for the gasoline that you put in your car? How about the rent or the payments on your house?

Do you have a television set? Or a radio? Did you buy them, or did you just salvage them from a junkyard and fix them up yourself? Don't you have to pay for the electricity to run them? And your lights? Utilities in general, such as water and sewage. Don't you have to pay either a fee or taxes to have your garbage hauled away? Or do you just glue it to the hood of somebody's car? How about clothes?

Then why should a professional musician, someone who may very well have spent a great deal of their own money on school and lessons and put in the time and effort to learn to play an instrument, or sing—or both, in the case of most singers of folk songs, has spent additional time and effort to learn songs and sing them well, and continue to learn more and more songs throughout their careers NOT be paid for plying their trade—just like everybody else?

Why is it that when they feel they should be paid for exercising their profession, you consider them "narrow, selfish, and greedy?"

And do without them? I don't think so!

Professional musicians—singers of folk songs—do a great deal to promote the kind of music they perform. For several reasons. One is that it is simply good business. Several folk singers, including me, sang at the United Nations Pavilion every Sunday afternoon over the duration of the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. We sang for free! To thousands of fairgoers. Several people who sang there, including me, got hired to sing elsewhere. Judy Flenniken and I were hired to sing at the Port Angeles Centennial celebration, and Nancy Quensé, Stan James, and I were hired to sing at the Port Townsend Arts Festival—for which we got paid quite well. I got several paid gigs from people who heard me at the World's Fair. And so did most of the other singers. In this case, exposure was good for us.

But you can't spend "exposure" at the grocery store. Most professionals do a lot of freebies, yes. But if a professional performer doesn't get hired for money, they'll soon have to hang up their guitar or banjo or Irish harp, and get a job pumping gas or put on a paper hat and ask people "Do you want fries with that?"

My first exposure to folk music was from professional singers of folk songs. When I was in my mid-teens, I heard Burl Ives's program "The Wayfaring Stranger" on the radio, where he talked about American history and sang songs about it. In one afternoon's program, I learned more about the building of the Erie Canal than I ever learned in any history class. And heard songs like "I Got a Mule and Her Name is Sal" and "When the E-ri-e was a-risin'" that afternoon. And a friend of mine had one of Richard Dyer-Bennet's albums. In the very late Forties and very early Fifties, I heard The Weavers on the radio and on juke boxes. And then, Walt Robertson's concert in The Chalet restaurant that I describe above.

This was in the very early 1950s, so I got turned on early. But how many people first became interested in folk music by listening to Harry Belafonte, The Gateway Singers, The Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, et al?

Professional musicians, Conrad! Professional musicians who performed folk songs and ballads! THEY were the ones who ignited the folk music revival in the first place and inspired many others to follow in their footsteps, or at the very least, learn to sing folksongs themselves for their own enjoyment.

I do not begrudge Pete Seeger or Walt Robertson or Joan Baez or Richard Dyer-Bennet or Guy Carawan or Judy Collins or any one of the dozens—hundreds—of other professional performers of folk music one nickel of their earnings. Not one nickel!

And Frank Hamilton, who is a regular contributor to this forum, is a first-rate professional singer and instrumentalist, AND he was a co-founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago back in the mid-1950s. I don't know for certain, but it may very well still be going. Now, Conrad, I don't think one can do any more to promote folk music than that. And there, too, people like Frank Hamilton deserve everything they have earned through their performing and much more.

Frankly, Conrad, your bad-mouthing of professional musicians as being "selfish and greedy" strikes me, first, as just bloody ignorant, then going on from there, downright mean-spirited, just because you want to free-load by enjoying the service, but not wanting to "pay the laborer his due."

Don Firth