CupOfTea (Joanne),

Been there, done that. It was around 1959 or 1960, I was singing regularly in a coffeehouse when someone asked me to sing "The Sloop John B." I had learned the song from An American Songbag by poet and song collector Carl Sandburg (publish 1927) and had been singing it for a good five years. So I sang it. The guy grumped that I hadn't sung it right. I asked him what was wrong with the way I sang it. He said, "That's not the way the Kingston Trio sings it!"

I didn't even know the Kingston Trio had recorded it!

I figured he deserved a smart-ass response, so I said, "Of course not! There are three of them and there's only one of me!"

Got a laugh from the rest of the audience.

The Joan Baez Songbook is right there in my library of folk song collections, too.

Don Firth