A little different kind of instrument horror story:

Pamir House, one of the coffee houses where I sang a lot in the early 1960s, had a small group of regular hired and paid singers, of which I was one. But the owner was amenable to letting people who wandered in off the street sing a song or two also. In fact, he hired a couple of darn good singers that way.

But this led to some people thinking that our song sets were free-for-all jam sessions and would sometimes join in without being asked, often to the exasperation of the "official" singer(s) and the general annoyance of the audience.

A plague upon the face of the earth are—bongos. They're cheap enough to buy and any idiot can bang around on them. An equivalent in some cultures is the bodhran. They can add if tastefully and appropriately used, but they so rarely are!!

Anyhoo, there is this half-witted but eager interloper there one night with his accursed bongos. I'm sitting up on the stool doing my set, with this yahoo throbbing and thumping along with me, mostly out of rhythm......

When one of the women customers asks me to sing "Greensleeves."

Now, this is a song I do well, if I do say so myself. A carefully worked out lute-like arrangement on the classic guitar, and rather than the interminable number of verses, I have condensed it to three, or at the max, four.

So I sing it.

And this brainless ninnyhammer sits there trying to add a calypso beat to a Renaissance love song!!

I go the applause, he got the dirty looks!

Don Firth

P. S. It was a few minutes later that the owner of the coffee house came out of the back and asked the guy to either put the bongos away or leave.