Wow! The subjects of some threads can really punch the old buttons!

Seattle, late August, 1959, about seven o'clock in the evening. In less than a week I would be leaving for California, so I dropped into The Folklore Center, a music store in the University District, to supply myself with a few extra sets of guitar strings and return a couple of records I had borrowed from a friend, who would pick them up there later.

The proprietor's wife was playing some folk records for a young woman sitting on a tall stool in front of the counter. I had seen her a couple of times in the coffeehouse where Bob Nelson and I were singing and here and there around the U. District, but I had never talked to her. She was tall, with long, dark brown hair; attractive—not "gorgeous" by Hollywood standards, but very striking. We got to talking, and soon abandoned the music store for a booth in a nearby coffee shop where we continued our conversation until they closed at midnight.

She was visiting her father (mother deceased) for the summer, and was due to return to school in a couple of weeks for her senior year at Bryn Mawr where she was majoring in English Literature and Philosophy. Her interests were wide-ranging and she was so intelligent it was almost spooky. Along with this, she had a sort of vulnerable, waif-like quality, and I found the combination particularly captivating. We were immediately attracted to each other. For some reason she seemed to take to me right away, and I to her.

We saw each other twice more before I left for California. Then we wrote every few days. I returned to Seattle from California a couple months later, and she returned to see her father over the Christmas holidays. During that two weeks, she and I spent a great deal of time together. Then she had to return to school. Again, we wrote to each other every few days.

She graduated (summa cum laude) in June, 1960, when she had an opportunity to go to Europe for an extended tour and further study. We continued to write, but she was on the move and often my letters had a hard time catching up with her. Several of them went astray. And I didn't receive some of her letters until many weeks after she had written them. Early in 1961 she was somewhere between Paris and London and I was somewhere between Seattle and Berkeley when we lost track of each other.

One of the songs on the record she was listening to in The Folklore Center was The Black Velvet Band. In one of life's bizarre coincidences, her long, dark brown hair "hung over her shoulder, tied up with a black velvet band." I noticed this and kidded her about it. She had a good sense of humor and kidded right back, and that's how we started talking. Later that evening, as we parted company in front of the coffee shop after our long conversation, she looked at me intensely for a moment, then impulsively untied the black velvet ribbon and tucked it into my shirt pocket.

I still have that bit of ribbon tucked away in the string-box of my guitar case. And although the girl in the song was not very nice, I can't hear that song without thinking of Jane, "the girl with the black velvet band" that I knew.

Don Firth