Sorry if I'm getting up your nose, Steve, but I get bloody fed-up with some of the stuff I hear from some people who seem to consider themselves to be absolute authorities on how folk music should (MUST!) be played. And their constant harangue about how you can't learn folk music from written music, and how studying music theory will bind you to a whole bunch of arbitrary rules and stifle your "folk creativity," and, in general make pompous pronouncements about how any kind of formal musical study will destroy one's ability to do folk music.

The scene: The mid-1950s.

So I'm sitting there in Howard's Restaurant, drinking coffee with this singer who is one of the better known singers in this area. I'm a relative beginner compared to him. He has been haranguing me because I am taking classic guitar lessons, the better and faster to learn to use my fingers to accompany folk songs and ballads, and he mourns for me due the fact that I took some voice lessons before I even got interested in folk music. I don't even mention to him that I'm planning to change my major from English Literature to Music because I want to make a career of singing folk songs and ballads professionally—like he's doing. I know damned well he'll try to talk me out of it, and even get a bit nasty in the process.

He—let's call him Fred—brags that he can't read music, he's never had any musical training, and didn't learn to play a guitar out of any manuals, he figured out all the chord fingerings on his own.

As Fred and I are sitting there in the restaurant, he asks me if I'm going to the Blue Moon Tavern tonight and lift a few. "No," says I, "I'm singing for a group at the Seattle Public Library this weekend, so I want to spend some time practicing."

"Practicing!" he snorts. "I never practice. It's a waste of time, and it leads to stilted playing and singing. I'll ruin your natural style."

"Oh," says I. "Then how do you learn new songs?"

"I just play them over and over again until I know them." (!!)

"And," sez I, wide-eyed in amazement, "you never—practice?"

"Never!" sez he.

O-o-o-o-okay. . . .

Some time later, his sister tells me that before he took up the guitar and singing folk songs, he had taken some nine years of violin lessons!

Okay, Fred, that was pretty funny! Tell me another one!

Simple. He didn't want the competition for available singing jobs!

Don Firth