After going with a young woman who was really into folk songs when I was in my early twenties and hearing, then subsequently meeting Walt Robertson (who really got me started on the guitar—and taught me a great deal about singing for audiences, which stood me in good stead later on)—I set about building a career for myself as a singer of folk songs.

Although I never became nationally famous, I was well-known around the Pacific Northwest, and made a decent living as a modern-day minstrel. I was heavily into learning the backgrounds of the songs I sang, and as a result, I was asked to do a series on local educational television, funded by the Seattle Public Library ("Ballads and Books"—without teleprompter or cue cards), and this led to many other singing jobs, one of which was in one of Seattle's first coffeehouses, run by the owner of an art and foreign film theater, who ran a clean place (your elbows didn't stick to the tables), and he paid reasonably well.

Over the years, I have sung many concerts, usually at colleges in the area, but also in local concert halls, such as The Playhouse at the Seattle Center, where Richard Dyer-Bennet sang three concerts during the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. I also sang regularly every Sunday afternoon at the United Nations Pavilion along with about a dozen other local folk singers, and the following year at the Seattle Center Hootenannies every Wednesday evening, which drew crowds of up to 15,000 people!

And along with this, perhaps a thousand or so "hootenannies" in private homes, along with other singers, just for the fun of it.

No song books, song sheets, or three-ring binders appeared at any of these events until sometime late in the 1970s at the Seattle Song Circle. Up until then people would not think of taking up the time of others with a song book or crib sheet in their hands. It was an unspoken "no-no!" People just didn't do it. Learn the song. Then do it.

A few newcomers to Seattle Song Circle began bringing copies of Rise Up Singing to meetings and singing out of the book—or out of three-ring binders they had prepared. We spent a great deal of time at some meetings listening to someone riffle through pages and mumble their way through songs that they sometimes hadn't even read before.

My wife and I—and all of the other real singers who first started the Song Circle—over a brief period of time, dropped out.

The moral of the story is:

Learn the damned song before you get up in front of an audience, bore the hell out of people, and generally make an ass of yourself!!

Don Firth