By late 1965 I had been singing for various audiences for thirteen years, and had sung regularly in coffeehouses since 1958. One evening I walk into the dressing room at a local coffeehouse to tune my guitar before doing my evening's singing, and encountered this barefoot kid, eighteen years old, wearing opaque, dime-sized dark glasses. I had seen him around before. He had been singing and playing the guitar for about six months, and he was a passionate admirer of Bob Dylan (that this was the case was not Bob Dylan's fault—he can hardly by dumped on because of the nature of his self-appointed apostles), even doing his utmost to sound like Dylan (i.e., an eighteen-year-old trying to sound like he was eighty). He wrote his own songs: angry polemics about the nature of the world interspersed with bouts of adolescent angst that droned on tunelessly for thirty verses or more. When he saw me walk in, he ups to me and he says, "Jeezus, man, you here again? Why do you bother singin' all that old crap? The stuff you sing isn't socially relevant (his very words). Nobody wants to hear that shit anymore! Why don't you just fuck off?" (Among other things, I think he wanted my job.)

This was a fairly extreme case, but around that time, I kept running into guys like this. The audiences liked what I did. In fact, most of them found me and my traditional "old crap" a blessed relief from what else was going on about then. But I was one of the few left, and the coffeehouses started closing up for lack of audiences. Wonder why?

I would hardly call this little gink a member or the "folk police," but there are still creatures around like that, among singer-songwriters and traditionalists alike. Ignore them, for their words carry as much meaning as the cacophonous gobbling of a flock of turkeys. Lo, even moreso. They are like unto a herd of horses, bloated from getting into the oats and overeating, and are in the painful throes of breaking much wind.

Sing what you want, and if the audience doesn't like it, find another audience. They're there.

Don Firth