When I was 13 years old I got a guitar as a birthday present. I was always somewhat musically inclined. I had taught myself how to play the harmonica when I was 7 years old. My parents had me take piano lessons when I was a little older. That lasted only a few years. When I started Junior High School I joined the band and learned how to play trumpet. Taking the trumpet home, I figured out how to make all the notes of a scale, but got no credit for my effort which is probably why I only last 2 years on the trumpet before the band teacher dropped me from band. But at 13 I got a guitar.
I watched a show on television about how to play the guitar. Never took any lessons but after a year or two was able to play a few Kingston Trio songs, “Tom Dooley” being one of them. I kept the guitar until I went to college. In college one of my roommates was a guitar player. He played quite well. Despite the fact that he and I did not get along very well he did manage to teach me a few more things about playing guitar. I’m not sure what finally became of the guitar, but by the time I had finished college it no longer existed and I felt no desire to get a new one.
It was my second year of teaching that I was introduced to The British Integrated Day classroom. This was a 5 day course at C.W. Post that I took that showed me how to enhance my teaching by adding arts and music to the curriculum and integrating different academics together to create incredible projects. Part of the course was to sing each day. I recalled how much I had enjoyed playing music and decided that that year I would incorporate singing of folksongs in my class.
The first time I began, I had no musical instrument as support, so I decided to do an a cappella round that I had learned in my British Integrated Day class, “Ah Ram Sha Sha”. I was impressed how well the 6th graders that I was teaching got into the song. I decided that I needed an instrument for backup. So a guitar it was. A colleague of mine got me a cheap guitar as a gift and from that day on I would sing with my classes each week.
A few years later another Middle School teacher introduced me to the Philadelphia Folk Festival and I was hooked on folk music. I decided to get myself a decent guitar, which I did and still use to this day. I still sing some of the songs that I sang back when I started playing in school. One of the oldest ones I learned is “The Cat Came Back” which surprisingly is always requested when I walk into a school or class that I’ve been in before even after many years. See “Remember That Song.” Going back to my beginnings I’ve even been able to play harmonica while I play guitar.
What started as a thoughtful gift from my family to encourage me to pursue and enhance the talent that I had displayed has grown into a integral part of me and something that I continue to grow with as I pursue my career of storyteller and performer.
