God''s Mercy to a Partially Tone Deaf Would-Be Musician

I am not a natural musician. My wife, Sheila, has perfect pitch and in high school her band teacher offered to get her a college music scholarship for the oboe, a particularly difficult instrument to play. I envy her. Me? I can barely hold a tune in a fair-sized bucket, but it helped a lot when Bob LeBard, my Valley Grande Academy chorale director, stood me between Dave Dameron and Steve Urich, two strong basses. It took me two years to learn to hear notes well enough to tune my guitar by ear. 

Before that I made use of a principle of physics/acoustics that allowed me to hold down the 5th fret of the sixth string and adjust the fifth string so that it vibrates when you strike the sixth string. Then I'd follow the pattern down to the first string. I could only get the guitar in the neighborhood of in tune. Dave would ask me, "Can't you hear that?" when I played my "tuned" guitar.  I couldn't. I just handed him my guitar. Eventually, I got to where if I struck the fretted sixth and the open 5th string at the same time I could adjust the 5th string till the note didn't warble.
 

God gave me this guitar. When I was first starting out playing guitar I had bought a beautiful solid blonde Mexican guitar from Kim Holdridge for $6. The strings were broken and the nut was missing. I replaced the nut and bought new strings and found I had a most lovely sounding classical guitar. Sadly a couple of summers later someone knocked it off the counter in the camp store and broke the neck. The lovely folk I worked with at Lone Star Camp all chipped in and surprised me with a new Yamaha classical. It died a few years after that in an accident - broken neck again. 

 

At the time, Mickey Thurber played a classical Goya guitar with the AYA team and I always wanted one. I've had two 12 string guitars. One died the same way as the little Mexican. My son lost the other one. I carried my instruments everywhere so it was kind of inevitable that wear and tear would have its toll. I lost 3 banjos one way and another over the years and I'm on my 4th and 5th. David Dameron who lived through a year of listening to me learn the guitar across the hall in the dorm at VGA. He gave me a banjo he had that needed repair. I bought some tools and repaired it not knowing what I was doing. I even straightened up the neck. Before that, I had built a Squared-Eel homemade longneck banjo from a kit my friend Mike Gregory sent me because he felt sorry that I'd lost my last banjo. I was getting good, because I extended the neck to make a longneck out of it. The head was a 2 liter pop bottle I tacked over the frame and shrunk with a hair dryer. Totally cool.

 

My best guitar (the one in the picture above) I found on eBay. It was a Swedish Goya like Mickey's, built in Gothenberg, Sweden before 1972. Some fool had tried to put steel strings on it and ripped off the bridge. I replaced the broken bridge by reading about bridge placement and my little Goya sings as beautifully as my old Mexican. God has been good about keeping me in good musical instruments and I've learned a lot about repairing and building instruments. I'm hoping to build a church dulcimer soon. It's rectangular rather than hourglass or oval shaped. I suspect it has a more low tone.

I've got the tools and I've got the web address of StewMac, a luthier supply place and a membership at Banjohangout.org where the guys love to give out advice if you get stuck. They turned out for me to be kindred spirits, which for banjo players is kind of like when your wife leaves you home alone without competent supervision. 

 

The best part of my musical journey is that I learned you don't have to be a professional musician or be in a band if you're too lazy to practice. I never got very good, but if, like me, you play off and on for 45 years you can follow along with "Awesome God." You can just play well enough to be in the church song service band and Kumbaya for campfires. Learn some chords. Simplify the arrangements. Make yourself a notebook of all the songs you like and do like our ancestor did and sit out on the porch where you won't bother your wife with the perfect pitch. The dogs will howl along with you. It's so special.

 

 

(c) 2024 by Tom King

The Booby Traps in Your I-Pod

Micah's graduation picture - in full kilt!

Within the modern day mp3 archives that we music lovers collect on our I-Pods (or in my case on my cell phone's mp3 music player) there lie little booby traps.  Thanks to Amazon.com we can now buy songs individually for 50 cents to a dollar instead of having to buy a whole album just to get two or three "good ones".  In this way, over time, we amass vast collections of incredibly eclectic music. This always amazes me a little, given that it didn't cost any more to put that big a music collection together 40 years later than it did to collect 45 rpm single records back when I was a high school kid. Not only that, but you don't even have the cost of a trip to the record store to factor in.

You can even collect free music from indie musicians you happen to like but the big record moguls don't particularly care for. As a result, I have banjo versions of Bear Necessities and All of Me, alongside several Doris Day hits, the theme to Dark Star (an obscure 1960s era sci-fi film and all my favorite hits by the Monkees and the Beatles; not to mention a miraculous duet with Placido Domingo and John Denver. I even scooped up an all-acoustic version of the Beatles playing Norwegian Wood. How cool is that?

Today's increasingly off-the-books music distribution system must make record company moguls frantic as they lose more and more control over whether or not an artist's music actually finds its way out to the public. You see, these days, the public listens to what it wants rather than waiting for record companies to tell us what we want to hear. No record company, for instance, would sell me a banjo version of Those Were the Days, the theme song to the TV show "All in the Family". Songs that are "golden oldies" need no longer wait for some "Greatest Hits" collection ot come out in order to get our hands on our favorite music. We can go online, buy and download the songs we like instantly. And I can even throw in a recording of a kid I used to teach in Sabbath School singing Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone at church or another one of my son and daughter with some friends singing a song called Miracle that my late son wrote with his brother. That one always makes me cry, but in a good way.

That's what I mean about booby traps. We often salt our music collections with songs that mean something to us - everything from "our song", a relic of our courting days, to one of our kids' favorite songs. One of those got me this morning. In 2006 we lost our middle son, Micah, a big bear of a young man who, at 28, stood 6'4" and was close to 300 pounds. When he was in high school, he wasn't exactly tiny - a big ebullient larger-than-life personality and a fun guy. He was incredibly shy, but covered it by being class clown and something of a show-off.

My mp3 player a few minutes ago rolled out M.C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This", one of Micah's favorite songs. You haven't seen anything till you've seen a kid Micah's size doing Hammer's moves to this song. And the boy had some amazing moves for someone his bulk. He played on his school's basketball team and had some muscles on him that used to fool opponents. These wiry little guys would rush him when he was defending the key, figuring they could topple him pretty easily. More than one wound up sitting on his butt on the boards, having struck what felt like a brick wall. They used to cry to the referees for a foul call. I remember one ref standing over one such prostrate whiner, "Hey dude, you're the one who decide to run into him." He pointed at Micah, "You need a little physics refresher there, son."

Micah also did a creditable "Electric Slide". These tiny little girls would drag him out on the floor at parties and get him to lead the "Electric Slide". It used to make him happy. He was pretty good at it too.

Micah had a lot of sadness in his short life. I think about those young women and the way they pulled him into the center of the action and encouraged him. They gave him confidence and, in a way, the courage, at the end of his life, to recommit himself to Christ. I am so grateful to Micah's friends for their love and acceptance of my son. A lot of big kids don't get that. He did. It's like you all knew somehow, how much he needed your support and love.

Micah (right) leading the girls' basketball team fight song from the stands!

That's why I was standing in my kitchen this morning listening to Hammer going, "Can't Touch This!" and crying like a big, hairy, white-headed 61 year-old baby. Some people avoid songs that do that to them, even though we inevitably salt our music collections with songs just like that. I don't avoid the emotion when that happens. I let the song run all the way through. Sometimes I turn it up and go ahead and weep without restraint. Sometimes you need that.

It kind of flushes you out emotionally. We miss our lost loved ones. It's good that we do. I don't want to forget a single thing about my son. To me it's evidence that we weren't designed to lose people we love. We were designed to live forever; to always be able to turn around and find those beloved people right there, ready to make another day special and joyous.

I'm ready to see this mess of a world come to an end and to start up a new one. Maybe God will let me plant trees for the new Earth. I always wanted to design a forest. Maybe the kids and I can do it together. Mom can supervise. I'll bring the tunes...

Tom King
(c) 2015

Life Should Be a Musical

McFerrin "Plays" an Audience

I saw this Youtube video the other day with the amazing Bobby McFerrin in which he demonstrated how to "play" an audience.  Go ahead and watch it.  I'll wait......

Wasn't that nice?  McFerrin showed how, as humans, our brains are wired up to respond to the pentatonic scale of music.  There is no evolutionary purpose for that. I believe that God has created within us all a shared ability to create art together by giving us shared basic gifts, like natural response to tone and musical organization, color sense, pattern recognition, kinesthetic sense, social perception and rhythm.

It's why, when we hear music in an elevator, we may be scarcely aware of it, but unless we suppress the instinct, we will soon find ourselves beginning to hum the tune, sing the words softly and sway in rhythm to the music. We respond to it quite naturally, as though we are wired up to respond to it in that fashion - to share and participate in the music around us.

I believed that God wired us up in such a way that we can instinctively respond to, create and participate in acts of spontaneous joy. That's why I like the flashmob things people do where choirs and orchestras and bands and dance groups suddenly come together in public spaces and create these wonderful bits of auditory, physical and social art.

I think musicals are a preview of heaven. I think that in the New Earth, we will spontaneously break out in song without any shame about it.  I, personally, don't think that we will sit in chairs to listen to the angel choirs "perform".  What I think is that we will, for sheer joy, break out in song and the angels will rush to our sides in order to be a part of the music.

I think that the music of the spheres will be with us wherever we go. I think we will break out singing and dancing, just from the sheer joy of being alive and for the love of God and each other and the things of all creation. I think we will make musical instruments and carry them everywhere with us, just in case music breaks out. I don't think it's an accident that the "Hallelujah Chorus" is one of the most often performed flashmob pieces on Youtube. It just seems right. The tradition of standing during the Hallelujah chorus began because a queen spontaneously rose in respect during one of the first concert performances of the Messiah.  When the Hallelujah chorus began, she rose to her feet and with her the entire audience. Today, standing up in the Food Court or a shopping mall and singing "Hallelujah" at the top of your lungs seems like utterly like it's the right thing to do.

I think, that in heaven and the new Earth, we will create art, simply because a bunch of us want to express our joy and gratitude to God. I think we will celebrate each other, for after all, is not man and woman also the creation of God. I don't see us all spending eternity sitting around on a cloud with harps. I see us singing and dancing, creating vast spectacles simply because someone goes, "Hey, I bet if we all started jumping up and down and waving towels over our heads while singing this new song I wrote, that it would look all kind of cool!"

And then several thousand of us would all get together and practice it till we had it down, then we'll sneak over to the next town and drift into the town square and do a flashmob kind of thing to make the people there smile.  They'd probably join us.

I am certain that eternal life in the new Earth will be exactly like that.

© 2013 by Tom King

Music Returns to My House

It's been a rough week for us, but sometimes after the storm, the birds sing. I heard my sweetie singing downstairs as she's been cleaning. The disease she's fighting is cruel and one of the things it took from her these past few years is her music. When I heard here sweet voice singing our old lullabies and folk songs, I had one of those misty moments guys aren't supposed to get. Pretty soon we were singing the songs together and when she sings with me, it makes me sound so much better.

She has a beautiful voice and perfect pitch.  I have a weak voice and require the use of a bushel basket to carry any kind of a tune. My choir director at Valley Grande stood me between a strong bass and a baritone hoping they would influence me in the direction of the tune. Oh, I wanted to sing in the worst way, but I soon realized I just didn't get the gift.  Mr. LeBard let me in the choir, I think, mostly because he hoped I'd be a good influence on the bass section.

Sheila and I couldn't remember some of the old tunes, so I looked a few of them up as I was sitting at the computer. Then I dug out a few tunes on Youtube. After a while I fired up my favorite music machine - Pandora.  Now this isn't exactly a commercial for Pandora, but whoever came up with the idea for Pandora.com is a genius. I don't listen to the radio anymore. I literally cannot find a station I like.

With Pandora you can build a personalized radio station around a favorite genre, a favorite artist or even a favorite song.  To give you an idea, the station I'm listening to has the following search criteria:  The Roy Rogers song, "Happy Trails", "Pearly Shells" by Burl Ives, "Aloha Oe", and Danny Kaye. What's come up is everything from Sons of the Pioneers to several beautiful Hawaiian slack guitar pieces, some country folk pieces, Glenn Miller's "In the Mood", a Jimmy Durante piece and a duet with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.  If stuff comes up I don't like, I hit the "thumbs down" button and it jumps to the next song and learns what I like and dislike. If I want to hear something again on that station, I hit the "thumbs up" button and it will show up again in the mix.

Earlier, I was listening to a video of Doc and Festus from "Gunsmoke" talking philosophy.  Doc said, "A man only gets three things in his life if he's lucky, a good horse, a good dog and a good woman."

Cinnamon

I'm lucky, I've had all three.  I rode a beautiful little red quarter horse named Cinammon for two years when I started the Odyssey Harbor Equestrian program for emotionally disturbed kids. She and I learned to ride together. I hated leaving her behind when I left Odyssey Harbor. She was a great horse.

I cut several miles of new riding trails back through the woods on her back. I'd cut limbs with a machete, like a cavalry officer swinging a sword.  She never jumped or reared. She'd have been a great war horse. She was half-broke when we got her. I read a book on horse training and as I learned she did. She was a very forgiving animal.

Me and Daisy

My dog, Daisy, is with us now. She was a gift from God and the best dog I've ever had. She practically house-broke herself. She's obedient and she's the only one in the house that believes that I am the alpha dog around here. I just hard down love this dog.

She and I walk 3 to 5 miles a day. She is the first dog I've ever had that enjoys playing fetch. Sometimes, I think she understands English. She's fiercely loyal, protective of us and has very sharp teeth and a bite so powerful, she reduces bones and hard rawhide chew treats to flinders in a matter of minutes. She loves everybody (except UPS guys and the postman). She has a fan club among the kids in the neighborhood and never met a person she didn't like if they'd scratch her behind her ears.

Sheila

As to the good woman, I've been married to her for 38 years and counting and as she came through a couple of minutes ago, I swept her up in my arms and twirled her around the floor while Jimmy Durante sang "I'll Be Seeing You".

It was just a moment, but life is good because of those moments.  The vacuum cleaner is going again and my sweetie is making the place smell good.  Louis Armstrong is singing "La Vie En Rose" on Pandora and my good dog Daisy is scratching my leg to tell me she needs to go outside.

I think maybe a man needs a good radio station too and that's pretty much it.  My life is complete, I guess.

Thanks Pandora, Daisy, Sheila and Cinnamon....

Tom

Miracle - Micah's last song

My young-un's, Matt and Meghan and friends Scott, Dunn and Lexa doing a song that Micah wrote the lyrics for shortly before he died. The sound isn't the best, but these are the words.....

MIRACLE

Lyrics by Micah King / Music by Matt King

The Son of David born, To the earth and for the people

One worthy of our faith and love, A prophet deemed by grace

To teach the word of God, Condemned by mortal man

Obeyed by all who dedicate, To His eternal plan

I’ve heard how You fed thousands, With only 2 fish & 5 loaves of bread

I heard You parted waters, For the people that Moses led

I’ve heard You walked on water, And made a blind man see

Now I pray to Heaven’s Keeper, Lay a blessing down on me

A promise of salvation, To all who seek Your truth

A gift sent straight from Heaven, I am Your living proof

The promise through Your hands, My map was carved in stone

The tools I need to reach thee, To one day reach my home

I know of all Your miracles, Feel Your Spirit enter me

Come from the dark into the light, I follow faithfully

You put Your spirit in my soul, Was blind but now I see

Worked wonders for my heart and soul, Your miracle is me

Musical Heresy

Are The Purists Full of It?

by Tom King (c) 2011

I need to just start going to the Banjo and Flatpicker Hangouts everyday, sign up for the free banjo and then leave. I keep checking in on the forums and getting in the middle of arguments about musical orthodoxy. It seems that any discipline undertaken by human beings, whether politics, religion, science, art, sports, music or gardening, has the potential to divide into hidebound orthodoxies and cat fights among aficionados.

I'm not sure what that says about human beings - maybe that if we can't find something to fight about, we'll make up something. Every type of music there is has its snobs. Even old-time banjo music which is a rough-folksie music form if there ever was one has its purists.

To quote Rodney King (no relation), "Why can't we all just get along?".  Oh, well, I'll probably keep cruising the forums because I like the people there and there's a lot of fun to be had. And I can hardly resist puncturing the occasional purist, just to watch 'em pop!

Me, I find I like the original innovators of music rather more than the imitators. I think most people are more likely to prefer specific songs rather than specific artists. I find few artists that produce music I like 100% of the time. Two of my favorite songs are by Crash Test Dummies and Lyle Lovett, but I would not call myself a fan of either artist. I was listing favorite songs for a bio request for a profile piece that's being done on me. If was odd how few of my favorite songs were by artists that are represented by more than one CD or record in my collection.

That's one of the things I love about festivals - the opportunity to discover new songs I like. I ran across "She's In Love With the Boy" at the Kerrville Folk Festival - not by Trisha Yearwood, but by the author, Jon Ims. I liked his version better. It's more heart, less Nashville. I'm afraid if I'd pursued musicology instead of communications, I'd have been run out of the musicology business as a heretic.

I think, for instance, that Bob Dylan had some good songs in him, but wasn't the genius people gave him credit for being. Leonard Cohen's a heck of a poet, but way too full of himself to stand to listen to - which is why I'd rather hear someone else do his songs.  Earl Scruggs on the other hand is a decent, generous man and musician and it makes me smile to watch him play, especially when he's working with others. He makes them forget themselves and be better musicians. And then there's John Denver who tried so hard to be the second coming of Frank Sinatra toward the end of his career and always wound up still being a country boy and something of an innocent. His duet "Perhaps Love" with Placido Domingo was a brilliant contrast between the razor perfect, but overblown opera singer and the gentle country tenor. Willy Nelson did a duet once  with Joni Mitchell on "Cool Water" that blew me completely away. Of course, Willy always makes other singers sound better for some weird reason.

Great music is subjective - what appeals to you. I heard a two year old sing "Jesus Loves Me" once that was uttely beautiful - a combination of a perfect voice and a child's heart. I believe perfect music is, to a great extent, only what is perfect to you. What touches you, makes you laugh, cry or rejoice comes from the music, the lyrics, the time, the place, the performer and even your own experience and background. I've heard performances that "experts" told me were perfect examples of some musical discipline or other (classical, rock, big band, the blues, bluegrass and even folk). I found many of those so-called "perfect" performances to be tedious, dull or just plain irritating. At the same time, I've heard such genre twisting, heretical renditions of songs such as would send the purists screaming into the night and ran straight out to buy the record.  God bless every man, woman and child who sings or plays from the heart and doesn't give a blowfly's proboscis what the critics think.

If it weren't for such musical heretics, the world would be a poorer place indeed.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King - Tyler, TX

On Being Musically Cool



I wish!  The miracle of Photoshop places me in
very cool bluegrass company

 Let's face it, I'm musically uncool. I'm the guy the snarky comics make fun of on Comedy Central. I listen to Enya, Irish music and Bluegrass.  I have bought children's albums after all my kids were grown up. I play banjo - outside, when everyone is out shopping.

There is some music I don't appreciate. There's a character named Beefus on the Banjo Hangout website (where I'm a long-standing member), who plays an electric banjo in some sort of really bizarre grunge style. Beefus is, as the inimitable Robert Earl Keen so eloquently put it, "taking bluegrass where bluegrass has never gone before."

I don't much think Beefus cares whether the rest of us go with him or not.. Frankly, there's not enough peyote in New Mexico to get me to follow the boy (not that I don't appreciate his joie de vivre ).

People tend to marginalize bluegrass music, despite evidence of widespread appreciation for the music - just check out how many bluegrass festivals take place in this country every year. One would think, if one believed the recording industry, that bluegrass music is a marginal musical genre like polka music and klezmer. But, I believe that an appreciation of bluegrass is under-reported by those who secretly like it, but do not wish to be made fun of by their cool friends. The music of Yanni, Enya and Kenny G suffers the same problem.

Thank goodness we can buy and download Mp3's from the Internet in the privacy of our own homes. Bluegrass is sort of like musical porn. Everybody's got some, but no one wants to admit it except those who don't care what anyone thinks.

Me, I've decided to publicly display my collection of bluegrass, Irish and folk music alongside my animated children's film collection. (Admit it, you watched "How to Train Your Dragon" without any children in the room and you laughed). Einstein believed space was curved. So, my strategy is to become so completely uncool that I lap round the universe and become cool again.

So far I'm still pretty uncool as far as my kids are concerned. I think it's farther 'round the universe than I originally thought.

Tom King
(c) 2011

Banjo Snobs

July 5, 2010 -

Snobs make me tired.

A gentleman I know on another banjo forum, recently complained that he had been 'schooled' by old-timey and bluegrass players about his unusual playing style his granddaddy used that a relation of his taught him recently.  He's getting older now and would like to teach someone else how to play this way so the style is not lost.  It's apparently the opinion of some banjo wags that the style has no value since it's not "authentic".  It uses an up pluck followed by a frail and thumb pluck variant similar to clawhammer, but with a different feel to it.

I told him he needs to find someone to teach the style to - preferably kinfolk, but at least leave someone behind who knows how to play it. There are lots of folks out there who would love to pick up a little known authentic style.  Even if it's a style that belongs to just one family, it's a valid and authentic way to play banjo.

Heck, if there's a group out in the hills of West Virginia that play the banjo with their noses while swinging naked from a tree, who's to say the style is not authentic?   If that's your style, find some kinfolk you can teach it to and tell 'em you'll leave them your banjo when you're gone - all they have to do is pick up the playing style and pass it on.

The folk purists make me tired.  They take an art form (folk music) and try to add rules as to what is correct and what is not when, in fact, any style of playing that produces interesting music is "authentic".  Bluegrass grew from a lot of traditions, plucking (if you will), the sounds from several old-time styles, adding some innovations by "folk" like Earl Scruggs and passing it along to a new generation. Really good musicians often learn a variety of styles. 

I encouraged Alex, to at least record some of his music on video and post it to Youtube so that it doesn't get lost.  He should record some "how-to" teaching videos so that anyone who wants to learn the style can look at his videos and learn to play the style.  Look how many great songs would have been lost if the Lomax brothers hadn't run around all over the countryside with a tape recorder.  "Home on the Range" for instance would never have survived to this day without them.  How many other songs and musical styles have been lost because they were never recorded.

Who cares if some tin-pot banjo tyrant says your style isn't authentic. I don't care if he is a musicologist.  There isn't a musicologist worth his salt that can know every type of music that's out there, much less tell you what style is right and what is "wrong".

If you've got a unique style or your family has their own songs or traditions, do what you can to preserve it. Get it all down on tape or video and post it in the great eternal Internet archives.  Save the videos on DVD too and get copies into the hands of as many sympathetic banjo players as possible. Make preserving your family's style of banjo playing (if they have one) your legacy to your family and to traditional banjo music.

Some of the anger that odd duck banjo players get, whether from bluegrass, clawhammer or old-time people is because some players get pretty snooty about their own "authenticity" and somehow come to regard themselves as the guardians of banjo purity.  They try to "school" bluegrass banjo players of clawhammer or old-time or independent backwoods plucky-frailers because their style is "wrong", "not authentic" (you're wearing the wrong hat while you play) or "too commercial".

When are people going to stop practicing this sad form of banjo socialism.  A Greek dictator (they called them tyrants back in those days) went to visit another dictator to find out how to keep his people in line.  The second tyrant took him into a field of corn and sent his slaves into the field with knives. The slaves cut off the heads of any stalk of corn that stuck above the others till they had mown the field to a flat uniformity.  The beauty of this method, the dictator explained, was that once the people became used to the uniformity, the "regular" stalks would start cutting the heads off the tall stalks for you - you'd no longer have to do it yourself.

When are we going to realize that the more different styles there are out there, the more banjo players there will be and the more new and innovative music you're going to hear. If we open it up to every old tradition and new-fangled innovation, we keep banjo playing from becoming an ossified, stuck in mud "art" form, hemmed in by pseudo-traditions about what we can and cannot do. Doesn't anyone hear how stupid we sound when we try to argue about what's right and wrong in banjo playing.

This is the banjo for heaven sakes. The thing started out as a string a stick and a gourd for crying out loud. The banjo's music has from the beginning been all about making it up as you go. It's the height of arrogance to get caught up in an argument over what's "right" and what's "wrong" about the way anybody plays the banjo.  It is enough that they play it and it's even more cool that they bring their own artistic sense to the playing.

Nothing kills a musical style or instrument faster than to hem it about with rigid rules about what is acceptable playing and what is not. I get just as excited about some grizzled old farmer flailing away on a ratty old fretless using a stile his granddaddy invented as I do about some so-called "authentic" old-timey band with the proper hats and shoes, or about Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck or Roy Clark.  I even enjoy Rocky Top, Dueling Banjos and Cripple Creek. I've heard them done so many different ways I can't count and I never get tired of hearing what the next guy is going to do to them.

It's all cool.  What I say about it is simply, "Let them banjos ring!  (or plunk, twang, hammer on or roll like machine gun fire for that matter). 

I'm just sayin'.

Tom King

* We called this style "Hairgrass" - a variant of 70's hair bands only played while barefoot and wearing a tie with washtub bass, guitar, banjo and flute and gospel music.  It was early in the summer, so my hair hadn't grown out much yet, though I had a good start on my beard (I'm the banjo player).  I went to a Christian academy and we had to shave and trim during the school year.  So summers we all got hairy mostly because we could and also because it made our elders nervous.  

Making God Smile

It's things like the all-Yoppie Bluegrass Gospel Band that make me think that God created us to give Himself a reason to smile......

(click on the video to see it in full, wide-screen Yoppie-Vision)

Artists Who Whine and Other Sacred Cows

I hear the Dixie Chicks are breaking up. It set up a lively discussion on the Banjo Hangout that, so far, the moderators haven’t shut down. The folks are keeping it civil thus far.  Edavidt (not his real name) finally made the “artist’s prerogative” argument.

I knew it was coming.

Edavidt said that it is “…unreasonable to expect someone who is an entertainer to keep their opinions…to themselves.”  He went on to say that he felt that some of us thought “..the Dixie Chicks exist for the personal gratification of their fans and nothing else.” He seems to think this is a bad thing.


The truth is, if you want to make money in show business, then you pretty much "exist for the gratification of your fans".  You see, since we are not living under a totalitarian regime where we were forced to attend concerts and applaud on cue, we are free to vote with our feet and our bucks.

No gratification, no fans.  More than one performer has learned this lesson the hard way.  Most performers stick to a style and go off-line with their personal forays into other formats or into extreme ideas their fans might not understand.This protects them from fan backlash. You learn this and exercise control to prevent it.

Dan Fogelberg confused some of his fans with his forays into light jazz and bluegrass. He also gained some fans, but there is a risk to doing something your fans don't expect.  Fogelberg's folk/rock career subsided after that, largely, I think because the Leader of the Band had confused the band and they didn't know where he was headed and weren't sure they wanted to go there with him any more. It was unfortunate.

You can say whatever you want to in this country and in most democratic Western nations. The United States in particular is still a free country last time I checked. But freedom comes with a price. If you are willing to pay the price for your right to say what you think, fine. If not, you should probably keep your commentary off the stage. I'm tired of performers who whine that people don't want to pay them money to perform just because they said something those folks did not like.

Too many performers mistake fan worship for evidence that they have the power to speak and have fans blithely accept every word they say as gospel.  Tain't so. 

I like a lot of songs that are performed by artists that I personally find reprehensible in their conduct.  I love to watch Tiger Woods hit a golf ball, but his recent behavior rather dimmed my interest in his opinion as a spokesperson. That's just how it is. My admiration for him as a person dimmed dramatically when I found out what he did to his wife and child.  I don't care how good a golfer he is.

If a performer goes too far with their songs, I lose interest in their music like my friend Mike's wife, Irene did with Barbara Mandrell.  Barbara sang a song "If Lovin' You is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right" that said I don't care about your wife and kids, I want you.  Irene knew too many put upon wives and children who had lost husbands to these sorts of predatory females.  Irene never listened to another Barbara Mandrell Song.

Now Barbara had every right to sing that song, but in choosing it, she listened more to her entourage than to the fans that made her popular. I kinda lost respect for Barbara over that song myself.  She had every right to sing it, sure, but I have every right not to like it. I've lost interest in wading through "message" or “shock” pieces looking for a song I like.  I'm too busy for that.

"Oh, but I only listen to the music, not the words."

Bah!  Anyone who tells you that can probably lip sync several hundred pop tunes off the top of their heads, so don't tell me the words don't matter. They matter. They get in your head and influence what you think or feel without you even knowing it.  Next time your 10 year old darling daughter starts ripping out rap lyrics about "ho's" and 'bustin' caps", ask yourself what her brain is learning about the meaning of life when there is all that garbage floating around in her cerebrum.



Artists have a long tradition of challenging the status quo, of making statements with their art. That is their right and privilege.  BUT, they also have a long tradition of starving for their art and not being recognized till long after they are dead. You really need to decide are you an artist or a performer (i.e. a 'star'). If you choose to be an artist, don’t be surprised if people don’t like you. That kind of goes with the whole artist thing.

Either way, neither artists nor stars are sacred cows that we have to allow to wander into our houses and poop on the kitchen floor. If they become obnoxious, we have this quaint ritual called the barbecue......

 Just one man's opinion,

Tom

* Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks in Austin, TX. - Photo by Ron Baker. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

A Modest Proposal to Change the World

Pete Seeger is 90. Good for him! You know it's possible to appreciate a person for their character even if you disagree with their politics. Many of us want the same things, we just disagree on how to get there. I love Pete Seeger's music and his great love for people and music and the world he lives in. The man is humble, sweet and utterly harmless.

The tragedy is that whatever your belief system, left, right or middlin', there are those who would co-opt your attempts to solve problems in the name of grabbing power for themselves. For every Pete Seeger there's a Joe Stalin. For every Ted Nugent there's a Sadaam Hussein!

It's too bad it's not up to people like Pete and Ted and most of the folks I've met on the Banjo Hangout, on Facebook and Virtual-Village.org (with a couple of notable evil power-mad exceptions). Pretty much anything we tried to make things better would work because we're all nice people. The problem is, they'd never put Pete or Ted or most of the folks on my friends lists in charge. The guys who seize power are almost inevitably people who crave power (and get kicked off my friends lists).

I'm terribly conservative and absolutely love Pete's music and I agree with what he wants to do. I want the rivers to be clean and people who mess up the world should clean up after themselves. I want hungry people to have food and for war to end. I can sing "If I Had a Hammer" and agree with every word.

That's why music is such a wonderful thing. If we really wanted to unite this country, we should look to folk musicians for an example of how to dialogue.

You make a big circle, everyone gets out their instruments and when it's your turn, someone will point to you and say "take it".

Everyone in Congress should be required to play a musical instrument well enough to carry a 60 second break. Take the desks out of the House and Senate and replace them with stools and mike stands.

Instead of banging a gavel the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate should tap the podium with a baton and go, "Uno, dos, tres, quatro......!" and then start that head bobbing thing.

CSPAN would at least be a lot more entertaining......

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We've got Democrats in the Congress once again

A Post Campaign Song

(Tune: We've Got Franklin D. Roosevelt Back Again - 1936, Bill Cox)

Just hand me my old banjo,
For pretty soon I can go,
Back to dear old Washington far away.
Since Obama's been elected,
We'll not be neglected.
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again. 

Chorus:
Once again, once again,
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.
Since Obama’s been elected,
The Economy’s been corrected.
We've got bucketfuls of money pouring in.

We’ll take ourselves a little toke
We’ll eat our veggies till we choke.
The diet cops will watch us night and day.
You can tell a dirty joke. Fornicate, but you can’t smoke.
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.

Chorus:
Once again, once again,
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.
Rush Limbaugh will be buried.
Gay folks can all get married.
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.

No more mortgages to pay.
The donkey won election day.
No more workin’ in the blowing, snow and rain.
Security is watching us.
We’re all riding on the bus.
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.

Chorus:
Once again, once again,
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.
Since Obama’s now above us,
The whole world’s gonna love us.
We’re gonna all be just as poor as them. ...

Poor as them, poor as them
We're gonna all be just as poor as them.
And if you're not a socialist
You're name is on the enemy's list
We've got Democrats in the Congress once again.

© 2009 by Tom King

Day Care Blues

Trout Fishing in America is one of my favorite groups. As a survivor of more than a decade in day care and child care, I really get this song....
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Generations Pickin' Together

This is a snippet of our Tyler Youth Sabbath School Song Service showcasing our new young band members alongside a couple or three old geezers. My job is to train 'em up. When they get good, the Praise Team swipes 'em and I have to find new youngsters to train up to play in the band. It's nice work if you can get it even if you don't draw a paycheck for it.



You can find another bit at this link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYXvPZbOUZA

In this one, I lead the kids astray - starting out with the wrong version of Away in the Manger. The kids are very patient with their doddering old song leader, waiting for me to catch the mistake. I just love these kids.

Makes me happy to see the kids learning their craft.

Tom

New Happy Birthday Song

The issue of copyright infringement and the payment of royalties for "The Happy Birthday to You Song" has gotten ridiculous!! You know the song I mean. We all grew up singing it to each other on our birthdays. We've all sang, "You look like a monkey and you smell like one too!"

But I won't put any of the actual lyrics here since I can't afford the royalty payments and this could be considered use of the song for profit making if my readership ever gets large enough to support advertising. The movie The Corporation claimed that Warner/Chappell, the copyright holders charge up to US$10,000 for the song to appear in a film. The Walt Disney Company paid the copyright holder US $5,000 to use the song in the birthday scene of the defunct Epcot attraction Horizons. In a 1987 documentary about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eyes on the Prize, there was a scene in which Dr. King was feeling discouraged. In the scene, at a birthday party for him, there was a significant beginning of his discouragement lifting. The film was not able to be released when the filmmaker could not afford the $10,000 it would cost to include the sequence that included the "Happy Birthday to You" song. (cited in Wikipedia's article on the song)

The furor of copyrights has gotten ridiculous in some quarters. So, I propose we create a new birthday song. Now is the perfect opportunity for someone to make up a new Birthday Song to replace the old one.

So, today, I decided to write a new birthday song and promote it to replace the old copyrighted one. My Sweet Baboo helped me come up with this rather pretty one in the car coming home from Christmas shopping tonight. She's got a good ear for composition and we both contributed ideas.

I'd love to put the greedy Happy Birthday song hijackers out of business and send a message to ASCAP, BMA and RIAA that we're "Mad as an old wet hen and we're not going to take it anymore!"

So, here is Tom & Sheila King's "New Happy Birthday Song"

The Birthday Song

Lyrics by Tom & Sheila King

Tune by Alexander Hume - 1850

(a setting of Robert Burns' "Flow Gently Sweet Afton")

Today is your birthday

And we’re all gathered here

To say that we love you

And wish you good cheer.

Rich blessings and joy,

Happy birthday to you.

Happy Birthday dear (insert name here) .

May your dreams all come true.

Copyright 2007 – Public Domain (No one living or dead may charge anyone for the use of this song in any public or private gathering, on any type of recording, film or live broadcast.)

The tune we used is at this link: http://www.contemplator.com/scotland/afton.html

Now if everyone will just pass it on, we can make this song famous and strike a blow for free use of birthday songs (and maybe we can supplant that awful one they do in restaurants now!

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Top Ten Hardest Musical Instruments to Learn to Play

Instrument: Didgeridoo
Difficulty factors: Hard to build, impossible breathing technique, sound varies from instrument to instrument, Noise to music gap is wide, practice tolerance by others - low
- Aboriginal craftsmen spend considerable time searching for a suitable tree to make into a didgeridoo. The difficult part is in finding a tree that has been suitably hollowed out by termites. If the hollow is too big or too small, it will make a poor quality instrument. Then, you have to learn circular breathing where you have to breath in through the nose while breathing out through the mouth. You can make a noise, but is it music?

Instrument: Bagpipes & Uillean pipes
Difficulty factors - Noise to music gap very wide, practice tolerance by others extremely low
- Bagpipes can be painful to listen to when well played. Poorly played they can be excruciating. That's why pipers march when they play - Makes it harder for snipers to hit them. Uillean pipers have to sit, so they don't last long. I don't think there's a soft setting for practice. At least with my banjo I can stuff a towel in the back and take the edge off it a little. With pipes you can't plug them into headphones or anything, so in order to learn to play the pipes you have to be able to afford an isolated practice site where the neighbors or your wife won't kill you.

Instrument: The violin and its cousins
Difficulty factors: Fretlessness, bow technique difficult to master, awkward position, noise to music gap wide
- Bowed instruments like the violin have a long learning curve, practice time can be painful for loved ones and neighbors. Not as loud as the bagpipes, but the slightly off-key scales and practice tunes can grate on the nerves of everyone, including the player. You have to have a good ear for pitch to master it. If you don't, you'll never be any good.

Instrument: Pedal Steel Guitar
Difficulty factor - too many things to do at once
- This one is simply physically challenging, practice isn't too painful for the listener, but the distance between making the notes pretty well and good music can take a while.

Instrument: Banjo
Difficulty factor - Doing 3 things at once, getting up to speed
- Banjo is easy to make sound on, chording isn't too tough, but getting your fingers up to speed and coordinated takes a lot of hours. Doing repetitive runs and rolls, practicing hammer ons, pull offs and slides and bumbling around high up on the neck and can make you distinctly unpopular round the house. If you're naturally uncoordinated, you may never be able to master it. Fretless banjo adds the difficulty of finding the pitch if you don't have naturally good pitch. You don't get any help from the frets.

Instrument: Oboe and anything with a reed in it
Difficulty factor: Getting rid of the squeal
- My wife was good at the oboe. Nobody else in her band would even get near the thing. She has perfect pitch and is a genius on the musical aptitude scale - it makes me crazy. She can just listen to something and know if it sounds right. Me, I can only judge whether I'm in tune by the rate of incoming wilted vegetables and spoiled fruit.

Instrument: French Horn
Difficulty factor: Getting sound from the thing
- All the difficulty of getting the lip thing going plus you have to hold it funny and it's hard to get sound from.

Instrument: The Human Voice
Difficulty factor: You need perfect pitch to be any good, you either inherit a good voice or you don't
- Though Bob Dylan seems to be the exception to the rule, the rule is pretty tough to overcome. You can whisper sing like Richard Harris and get away with it, but he did some training you can bet. If you're Earl, you let Lester do the singin'.

Instrument: Accordion
Difficulty factor: The constant ridicule and lack of respect
- You've got to admire Flaco Jimenez and the guy from Lawrence Welk and all the Irish squeezebox guys and the polka guys and the guys from Brave Combo. The accordion player gets so much abuse, never gets girls and has to deal with the back strain of carrying around what is essentially a small pump organ. It's a wonder anyone ever learns to play Twinkle, Twinkle little star, much less masters the thing.

Instrument: Electric sewer pipes
Difficulty factor: Telling your Dad he's paying for you to go to Julliard so you can study the electric sewer pipes
- I don't know of anyone but Blue Man group that plays the sewer pipes. I had hoped that, upon hearing them play the sewer pipes that PVC pipes would become the next musical fad, but was disappointed. I guess the instrument is so original that everyone else would have been derivative who tried to pick it up (kind of like Riverdance without Michael Flately or like the fat sweaty step dancers in that commercial).

Instrument: Tabla
Difficulty factor: No one will tell you how to play unless you marry one of their women
- The playing technique for these drums from India involves extensive use of the fingers and palms in various configurations to create a wide variety of different types of sounds; these are reflected in the mnemonic syllables. The heel of the hand is also used to apply pressure, or in a sliding motion, so that the pitch is changed during the sound's decay. This "modulating" effect on the bass drum and the wide range of sounds possible on the instrument as a whole are the main characteristics that make tabla unique among percussion instruments. The preservation of these techniques is important amd for centuries the secrets of playing were closely guarded and only passed along family lines. Being born into or marrying into a lineage holding family was often the only way to gain access to this knowledge. Now that makes an instrument really tough to play. Kind of like if you had to marry Earl's daughter (assuming he had one to spare) in order to learn Foggy Mountain Breakdown. I'd hope she was really cute, you know.

THAT'S MY TOP ELEVEN. TEN IF YOU DON'T COUNT THE VOICE AND SOME PEOPLE DON'T. I DO! I'VE HEARD PDQ BACH.

ANYWAY, THE LIST IS NOT DEFINITIVE BY ANY MEANS, BUT THERE IT IS.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Preparing for the end of the world....

Somebody started a discussion on global warming on one of my favorite forums (Banjohangout.com). What banjos have to do with global warming I'll never know 0ther than misguided attempts by the political correctness crowd to have banjo playing classified as a source of rural noise pollution and to include in the Kyoto Protocols, a ban on the use of banjos, accordions and bagpipes in all public places.

Actually, we've had a cool summer in Texas this year - lots of rain and flooding. It hit the 100's today for about the first time all summer. Is global cooling back? I remember 25 years ago we were gonna have an ice age for the same reasons we're now being told it'll be a melt down.

I decided after living an exciting year in Houston, Texas that it just don't make good sense to live along the coast. Hurricanes WILL hit everywhere along the coast at sometime or other. And if the sea rises or a tidal wave rolls in, it's going to be a mess. I deliberately don't live on earthquake fault lines or downrange of volcanoes. I live far enough south where blizzards are not a problem.

Our only headache here in East Texas is the odd tornado and they prefer trailer parks and small Oklahoma towns and besides they're only a couple of hundred yards wide, so if you go sideways really fast, you can avoid them most of the time.Every century you get an evil despotic dictator who starts a nasty war or conducts a genocide. Asteroids and big meteors - you're never gonna see 'em coming. Space aliens would pretty much whup us with their technology.

If the Apocalypse and the Second Coming happen, there's gonna be no place you can hide.

So, I figure I'll just sit on the porch with my banjo and work on Foggy Mountain Breakdown till I get it right. My plan is to master the high up on the neck part before we all freeze, roast, explode, get rolled over by a tank or caught up in a cloud....

It's not a big dream but it's mine.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Nearer My Banjo to Thee (Going Down With The Ship)

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

An acousitic jam session on a pontoon boat in the middle of Lake Tyler sounded like fun, so we all picked up guitars, fiddles, banjos and other implements of destruction and climbed aboard Naomi's leaky pontoon boat and struck out across the lake. Two of the musicians were Gordon and Christy McLeod of the Celtic Group Beyond the Pale. There was a bank president with a guitar, a nonprofit director and guitar, her husband (an unarmed architect), Naomi who was driving the boat, me with my banjo, guitar and assortment of harmonicas and a couple of innocent bystanders. We banged our way through bluegrass, Irish songs, country, western and an assortment of other nondescript tunes, serenading the rich folks sitting out on their very expensive porches in their very expensive houses that lined this exclusive lakefront. We were having a good time.

Gordon got out his fiddle and he and I did a fiddle & banjo rendition of the Jimi Hendrix version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower". Gordon can play just about anything and I did my best to follow. During the set, a couple of our heavier passengers moved forward in the pontoon boat (probably in an effort to distance themselves from the band in the back and any projectiles that might be launched or fired in their direction by irate East Texans along the shore.

As about 400 pounds of ballast moved toward the bow, however, the lead edge of the pontoons caught a wave and drove under the water. Naomi panicked and shoved the throttle forward, pushing the bow even further beneath the waves. As a low wall of water came rushing over the bow, everyone on the boat grabbed their instruments and held them over their heads, wondering how they were going to swim a half mile to the nearest shore while holding their guitars out of the water. Someone grabbed my guitar and held it to her chest like a flotation device. I tried to get it back, but unfortunately, nothing that would float was safe from the panicked nonswimmers aboard who were preparing to abandon ship with anything that looked remotely buoyant.

Fortunately, before my guitar became a canoe, I managed to convince Naomi that speeding up would probably not be helpful and as the propellers came out of the water she backed off the throttle. Since the boat appeared to be beginning its death dive, someone wiseacre with remarkable presence of mind began playing "Nearer My God to Thee" and the rest of us (not to be out smart-alecked) quickly joined in.

The nice thing about having the props out of the water, was that we stopped accelerating toward the bottom almost immediately and the boat lost momentum and settled back by the stern with a thumping great splash. We got the engine shut down and her bow popped back up streaming water from the decks.

Without pause we launched into "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and Naomi turned us toward home.

Since then, we've held our hootenannies on the dock or someplace where we don't need lifejackets. Some who have attended them, hoping to hear music have offered to take us all out again on various leaky boats, rafts and other potential submersibles.

As my grandpa used to say, "Some people got no sense of humor...."

Tom

My Gener-A-SHEE-UN

Click on the title of this blog or this link.  It will take you to a music video by what is arguably the oldest rock band in history!!!

The lead singer is 90 some-odd and the backup singers' ages added up would take you back to Noah. What a hoot! The group averages 76 years old. One of the guys is over 100, works three days a week as a plumber and beat up 3 muggers last week who tried to take his money.

I just added them to my "Friends" list on my myspace page. These guys are going to release an album in May. I just love this. I was depressed over my 53rd birthday this week. Now I don't feel so bad. I think I'll plug in my acoustic electric this week, go out on the back porch and sing some Creedence Clearwater Revival for the neighbors.

Talkin' 'bout my GeenerAshun.......

Just one man's opinion.....

The Power of Music

The year was 1956. I was 2 when I picked up the first of what would be a vast repertoire of odds and ends tunes that to this day rattle around inside my skull. The song was Tennessee Ernie Ford's immortal "Sixteen Tons". It was a folk song Tennessee made into a hit on the radio and I’ve never forgotten it. "I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine. Woke up early, went to work in the mine...."

The song was partially responsible for my love of traditional folk music and my disturbing tendency to pick up guitars and play snatches of "Freight Train" without warning. I learned this from my Grandpa. Grandpa was the second folk musician I ever encountered. According to family tradition, he’d once upon a time played a hot piano, but my Grandmother sold the piano early in their marriage and the subject of pianos was never again discussed. The only musical instrument my Grandmother ever played was a $12 Sears clock radio that wailed Earnest Tubb, Jim Reeves and Hank Williams for a couple of hours a day. It was all the music she ever needed and she operated under the assumption that this was about enough for anyone.

We all suspected she was a little jealous of the attention my Grandpa got when he played. Grandpa, a large pleasant looking man with an unlimited supply of blue overalls, occupied a tattered Barca-lounger at the center of my memories of their home. He was probably the most hen-pecked individual I ever knew, but even under the relentless domination of my sturdy Scots-Irish Grandma, he had his small rebellions. One of these was his collection of harmonicas. Periodically, under covering fire from the grandkids, he would pull out his mouth harp and rip off an assortment of scandalous old tunes to his delighted audience. I used to watch her peek around the kitchen door and shake her head disdainfully at us. She’d probably heard "Polly Wolly Doodle" and the "Rain Barrel" song thousands of times over the years, but we never tired of it.

The height of one of these sessions was when he let each have a short blow on his precious "C" harp. We always tried to get extra time by catching Grandpa alone and asking him to play for us. You knew you’d get more blow time without the rest of the grandkids there, but it didn’t always work. For one thing there was a sort of two kid minimum audience requirement unless my Grandmother was outside or she was in a festive mood because she had just inherited serveral thousand dollars from a relative she didn’t really like. Since the latter seldom happy, we had to sneak in harmonica time whenever she was outside messing around in the garden and complaining because Grandpa’s weeding left a lot to be desired.

I did manage to get a lot of one to one time, though, because I was the oldest and lived in the same town and was allowed to walk over to their house by myself. Grandpa taught me to make train whistle sounds first and then I picked up a couple of simple tunes. He later tried to explain how to triple tongue, a miraculous technique he used that made it sound like two or three harmonicas were playing at the same time. I’ve never quite managed it despite my wearing out 4 or 5 harps of my own as I grew older.

The old man played a mean harmonica. I learned wonderful tunes like "I Never Loved You Like I Loved You Last Night in the Back of My Cadillac 8" and "Let me call you Sweetheart". His harps often went missing or wore out, but whenever he got without one, one of the grandkids would find an excuse to replace. It got to where someone bought him a new harmonica every Christmas, Father’s Day, Birthday and, in an emergency, Bastille Day. He had a whole drawer full, so that he always had backup harps in case one wore out or got "accidently" tossed by my grandmother. He played "Polly Wolly Doodle" to four generations of children and taught us all to carry a little music with us wherever we went.

At the age of 10, I discovered a Peter, Paul & Mary album in my Grandmother's small record collection (a surprising discovery as this was a woman who considered Ernest Tubb a god and everyone else - well, silly!). I guess someone in the family was trying to encourage her (unsuccessfully) to branch out in her musical tastes. She wouldn't give me the record even though she hated it and I hinted shamelessly. So, I had to sit in her parlor on the stiff green sofa with my hands folded to listen to it over and over for hours on her hi-fi set with the volume turned respectfully low. Even under those conditions I became a hopeless folkie. During my adolescence I bought a battered Mexican guitar for $6 from a friend and rebuilt it. That next summer, I took a job at summer camp. Before I left for camp, I bought a Peter, Paul and Mary songbook and learned to play "Polly Von" as I remembered it from that album. It was the only song that had really simple chords and I played it incessantly all summer. I was known about the camp by my detractors as "Two-chord Tom. Each summer for 5 years I played for campfires and worship services adding Shel Silverstein's "The Boa Constrictor Song", Burl Ives' rendition of "Three Crae, Sa' Upon a Wae" and, of course, "Blowin' in the Wind".

I soon knew Alice's Restaurant (the entire twenty minute monologue) by heart. Just the first three chords used to send people running for the brush. Then I discovered the Clancy Brothers and to the dismay of my roommate in the dorm at boarding academy, I purchased a banjo. Over the next year, I heard approximately 3,000 banjo player jokes (How do you get two banjo players in tune? Shoot one!). I spent my senior year living alone in one of the nicer rooms in the dorm. Dean never did find anyone who wanted to live in my room despite the fact that some of the rooms had three guys bunked in them. A tribute to the power of music!

Seven guitars, four banjos, a dulcimer, 3 recorders, 43 jaw harps, 8 harmonicas, a mandolin, bodhran and two sets of bones later, I've been happily married for 25 years to a beautiful Scotch-Irish Indian woman and fellow folkie with a lovely voice and a passion for sad Scottish songs about suicide and betrayal. I am, at present, resisting a sudden urge to buy a set of bagpipes (since I like my current roommate and am well aware that most of those banjo player jokes can be equally applied to pipers).

When my grandpa died, my grandmother gave me most of his mouth harps. "That one there, you might as well throw away," she told me as I examined the collection on their kitchen table. "It got clogged up or something and he tried to put 3-In-One Oil in it to make it work again." she turned away from me and pretended to wash dishes. "The thing tastes like oil. You can’t play it. I don’t know why he even kept it."

I examined the harp; blew on it tentatively. It left an oily taste in my mouth. Then I remembered how once he’d been playing for the grand kids some years back, before we kids started keeping him supplied with fresh harps. He played a couple of bars, then stopped, frowned, licked his lips and made a face. We urged him on. He played another and another, just as long as we kept hounding him and then he played "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" to finish off the set. He must have tasted oil for a week. Now that was a dedicated musician!

(c) 2005
Tom King