Jim was teaching finger pickin' at a beat up old music shop (The Fret Shop) in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood in Dec. of '59 or '60. I played my first gig ever at a coffeehouse across the street---The Limelight. I taught beginning guitar at the store at the same time. I remember Jim playing on Ella Jenkins radio show "THE MEETIN' HOUSE" on WSBC-FM in Chicago then. He was a wonderful solo ragtime picker---songs like:San Francisco Bay Blues, The Cuckoo, Days of '49, Stacker Lee---all of which Fred Holstein and I learned and sang around for the next 4 decades. I still have a tape of Jim on Ella's radio show back then.

Later, in the 70's, Jim was a solo and I opened for him at Charlotte's Web--a grand club in Rockford, Illinois. Went hunting with him for 78 rpm records at TOAD HALL, a wonderful used book and record store in Rockford. Think I've got photos I took of that somewhere packed away. (Toad Hall is still there!) Opened for him another time at Richard Harding's club, THE QUIET KNIGHT, on Belmont & Sheffield in Chicago. Then heard of the Mel Lyman thing too. After that, no word at all... Sorry.

Art