Sometimes the request is okay, but the follow-up is a bit goofy.

So it's 1959 or so and I'm singing regularly three evenings a week in one of Seattle's nicer coffeehouses. This guy asks me to sing "The Sloop John B."

So I sing it.

He looks unhappy and mutters, "That's not how the Kingston Trio does it!"

I learned the song early on, probably before the guys in the Kingston Trio even met—and I learned it from Carl Sandberg's "The American Songbag," published 1937.

Can't please everybody, I guess….

Don Firth