When I was fourteen I bought my first guitar. It cost me $27 dollars, and I sweated blood to get it. I got it because I saw the Beatles in a news reel in my Junior high school the year before, and there were all these girls screaming and acting crazy and I figured that had something to do with guitars.
Once I got it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I found a a couple of chord patterns in a book and started strumming, but I didn’t know how to tune it so it never sounded right, and the chords I learned didn’t really go together so what I played wasn’t very satisfying and the truth is it might have ended up in a closet somewhere along with old baseball cards, and that vibrating electric football game, that never did anything but move the players in the wrong direction.
But there was this newly wed, guitar playing ex-marine that rented the second floor of the house we owned in Kansas City, and he kind of took me under his wing once he found out I had a guitar. He showed me this boogie woogie thing I could do on the bass strings that made me feel like a rock star, and he showed me cheater chords that made it easier to play my guitar (with the cheese grater action), and even taught me to tune the dang thing close enough that I could stand to play it. And having him live there probably had something to do with the fact that the first song I learned to play was “the ballad of the green beret”
And …. My daddy was a preacher and in this church was this wonderful lady, sister Crystal White who was an old honky-tonk country and western singer with a powerful voice and a load of personality who took me aside and taught me my first lead, the melody to that old gospel song “further along”, with I play to this very day.
When I first started coming around bluegrass festivals, I met a couple of wonderful fellows named Bob James, and Ernie Hunt at a folk festival in
Booneville called wild irus and I didn’t know nothing or nobody, but they invited me into their campsight and put up with my, outside the genre music, and began to teach me the way to play this beautiful music that we all love.
I owe all these folks a debt, and truthfully, it’s a long list of people I owe, like it is for each of us.
Every musical friend I’ve ever made has passed along something that enriched my life in some way, Every fancy lick, each small piece of instruction, every old song, every friendship, many that started with some question like “do you mind if I sit in?”
Like I said, I owe a lot of debts. Those who have been given much, have much to give.
I hope when the time comes to leave this here world. Somebody will say, “that old guy taught me a lot. He taught me how to do this boogie woogie bass thing, or he taught me how to do the G- run or sat and played music with me when I wasn’t very good, and I’m hoping that I don’t forget to share whatever I’ve learned with whatever young person is willing to listen, and I hope there’s more music in this world when I leave it than there was when I came into it. and I pray that I somehow manage to leave something that matters behind.
Some small payment on the debt owed.
Keep pickin’.
