Once in around 1960, I was standing in a music store in Seattle's University District, a store that specialized in folk music—folk records and song books, a line of relatively inexpensive but good quality guitars, other accoutrements. The proprietor and I, and a couple of other people, were listening to a record from the new shipment the shop had just got in. It was a recording of Win Stracke, a rich-sounding, obviously well-trained bass-baritone voice, accompanied on the guitar by classical guitarist Richard Pick (odd last name for a classical guitarist).

As we were listening, a fellow walked in laden with a back-pack complete with sleeping bag and carrying a guitar case. He stood and listened to the record for a few minutes, then he started to shake with anger. He pointed a trembling finger at the turntable and said, "That man, with a voice like THAT, has no right to sing those folk songs!!" and continued to rant and rave for several minutes while we just stared at him.

He was, of course, unaware that this man on the record was a co-founder, along with Frank Hamilton, of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, and the compiler of at least one book collection of folk songs that I am aware of.

This dude had hitchhike up to Seattle from Berkeley looking for work. He hung around for a week or so, then moved on. He did attend a "hootenanny" (at the time, an informal gathering of singers in someone's living room—before commercial interests got hold of the term and dinked with it) at which he didn't have anything good to say about anyone. He took particular issue with the fact that a couple of us played nylon-string classic guitars, and informed us ignorant Seattlites that folk songs should be accompanied by steel-string guitars only.

Nobody missed him when he left town.

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The Seattle Early Music Guild, which normally sponsors concerts and recitals by early music groups such as the Baltimore Consort, has announced a gathering for next month to which people are invited to come and sing any very old songs, presumably ballads, folk songs, or any other very old songs that they might know, from centuries back. Sounds like it could be one heck of an interesting gathering.

Don Firth