Musical training and soul are two different things. Be it opera, pop, folk, or Swiss yodeling, you can have one without the other. A musician who has years of training and fine technique, but who lacks soul is a well oiled machine that signifies nothing. A musician who has great soul, but little knowledge and faulty technique is stifled—unable to express that soul to the fullest.

Training does not place limitations! Many folkies in particular seem to think that training will load them down with a lot of rules and limit their creative freedom. That's hokum! Training shows you what you can do. It can show you possibilities you may never think of on your own. And the choice is yours. Just because you can do all kinds of things doesn't mean you have to.

Nor will training force you into some kind of mold. For example, not everybody has a classical voice. Joan Baez does, and she's able to sing that way even without voice lessons. But all the voice lessons in the world would not make Dave Van Ronk sound like Ezio Pinza. You work with the instrument you were born with. One major advantage of taking some voice lessons early on is that you learn how to avoid wrecking your voice.

What's kind of pathetic is when someone spends years trying to dope out something that a teacher could have shown them in one lesson. There's a woman here in town who's been playing guitar and singing since she was a kid. She's sung in coffeehouses, done concerts, and had a children's TV show at one time, singing folk songs. She does quite well, considering she has avoided learning anything about music theory out of fear of what she thinks is a bunch of "thou shalt not" rules. Every time she learned a new song, she had to have someone show her what chords to play or use the chords in a songbook. Her ear is good, but she didn't know what chords go together. A couple of years a go I showed her the Circle of Fifths (astounded that she didn't know it!) and explained it to her. She thought it was bloody miraculous! But if I'd metioned anything about music theory, her mind would have slammed shut and she'd still be wondering what chords go together and why.

Don't be afraid of a little learning.

Don Firth