Aw, shucks, folks. Thank you for the kind words. But I can't let Bob get away with that without revealing the truth about him! ("Enquiring minds want to know!")

I first met Bob in 1953 when he was 16 years old. He was avidly interested in folk music and had been singing for about three years. He had a good, clean guitar style, and a mature-sounding baritone voice. Most impressive. Six years later, Bob and I started singing together, and we sang three evenings a week for about eighteen weeks at Seattle's nicest coffeehouse, did several concerts together around western Washington, then took off to the San Francisco Bay Area to make our fortunes. Turns out we were too "ethnic" for San Francisco and too "commercial" for Berkeley (whatever "ethnic" and "commercial" mean). So we hung out in Sausalito where we met a bunch of wonderful people and where if you sang, that was all that mattered. So we sang our little lungs out an many parties and gatherings, got stiffed on several gigs (not in Sausalito -- in some of San Francisco's better-known joints!), and when we ran out of money, we returned to Seattle. We let the duo go as a regular thing because we both had time-consuming obligations (e.g., Bob got married), but we remained fast friends and continued to sing together from time to time over the past four decades.

Bob's baritone voice started out good and just got better over the years. An especially notable thing about his singing came from one of his early mentors. Bill ("Willawaw Willie") Higley taught Bob his first songs, and Higley was a taskmaster when it came to clear diction. Although you're not especially aware of Bob's diction when he sings, you always understand the words! I've often seen Bob hold an audience in the palm of his hand, from a huge crowd at the United Nations Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair in 1962 to an intimate group of a dozen or so people at his house about a month ago. This gathering at Bob's and Judy's was another magical moment for me. Due to an accident I had last year, this was the first time in many months that I've been able to get together with friends and swap songs.

You know, there are a lot of really fine singers out there (such as Bob) who have never made recordings or CDs and, as good as they are, they're not all that well known outside of their own vicinity. Others really ought to have an opportunity to hear them. Hmm. . . .

Don Firth

(P.S.: If it looks like my grammar has gone to blazes in my first post [as in ". . . it must of lasted for good five minutes," which should read ". . . it must have lasted for a good five minutes."], it's because I'm fiddling with a voice recognition program and, although it's pretty good, it has trouble distinguishing between words like "have" and "of," and it sometimes misses articles. Whenever I use it, I'll have to be sure to proof-read scrupulously.)