Day 29 – Me and my guitar…Part 1
It actually didn’t start with a guitar, but with a tiny ukulele. I don’t remember where it came from, but it had a little book with cords and that’s all I needed. For hours at the Colonial Ave house, I would sit on the side porch and play. It was my escape from the turmoil inside and I loved it.
Later, Mama got me a guitar when we lived on Memorial Drive. She got it with S&H Green stamps. These were stamps people used to collect for buying groceries, gas and a lot of other things. Somehow Mama got enough to get me a very cheap “Kay” guitar. It was small, hard to play and sounded a little thin (if you know what I mean by that), but I loved it. The strings were so tight I could barely push them down to make a cord. It didn’t matter though, I figured it out. For those who play guitar you will understand when I say that I couldn’t bar the E and B strings on the 1st fret to play an F cord, they were too tight, and I had to used two figures and still play an F cord that way today.
Anyway, I loved it because it gave me an excuse to hid in my room and not be around Daddy and I would get lost in the music and be free. Every night when Mama would come to say good night, I’d play a song for her I had learned. Now when I say I learned it that meant she would have to hold a note for as long as it took me to change figure position for a new cord. Imagine… “On top of old Smo…………………ky all covered in sn………..ow”. Mama was very patient.
After Daddy left, Mama could afford a slightly better guitar which I got that first Christmas without him. It was full size, but I still don’t remember the brand name. All I knew was it was a step up and that was great. I also learned to play the banjo, which she got me somehow, and every night in Greenville, I would sit on the front porch of the Meade Street house and play my guitar and banjo.
Later I found out that an older couple who lived a few homes down and across the street would come sit on their porch and listen to me play every night. Music was an escape for me and even though Daddy was gone, it was my quiet place of bliss where nothing else mattered.
The summer of my first year in college, I worked at a factory that my Stepfather Swede owned with another man. This was a great summer job mainly because it convinced me that I had to finish college to have a better life. I was wiring electric motors to a power source which wasn’t hard once they showed me, but it meant getting a lot of grease worked down into my fingers. I would come home every day, go down into the basement and take a scrub brush and Clorox bleach and scrub my fingers until they were clean. Why did I do this, well, we would take a 15-minute break mid-morning and mid-afternoon and I would sit with these guys who started at the factory when they were 17 or 18 years old and were now 30, 40 or 50 and their hands were black…you couldn’t get the grease out at that point. So, I scrubbed my hands everyday and swore I would finish college and get a better job.
The point of this was that at the end of the summer, I have enough money to go into Cincinnati, the area where Mama and Swede now lived, and buy clothes and more importantly a brand-new Yamaha acoustic guitar…I was in heaven. The sound quality was beyond great, and I was set.
That guitar played like a dream. When I was in High School, I used to come home, take my old guitar, listen to records, and figure out the cords to songs and play along. The group Peter, Paul and Mary were very popular back then and we had an album by them. I would listen, figure out the cords and play along not missing a beat. I’ll tell you an amazing story about them later, but for now, this is how I learned to play the guitar.
Mama’s mother was, Nonna, that’s what we called her, and she was a music teacher. Maybe that’s where I got my talent, I’m not sure. We used to sing in the car when we traveled with Mama because there wasn’t much on the radio. And I was in church choir as long as I could remember, so music was a big part of my life and eventually took me on some amazing paths, but that’s a story for another day.
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