Folk music

In my post about music I left out a part. When I was in high school, folk music became very popular. It started with the Kingston Trio. Their first hit was Tom Dooley. Other groups built on their popularity and soon there were many folk songs among the top hits of the day. There were even a couple of prime time folk song based TV shows. One was Hootenanny. Country songs that were done in a folk song manner were among those hits. Folk, pop, and country all kind of blended together and competed with rock and roll on the radio. I enjoyed them all. I loved to sing along with the radio.

Several of my friends bought guitars and started to learn the cords to accompany the folk songs. Mom had an old guitar which had been in storage since she was a teenager. It had been a steel guitar which had all smooth strings and was played with it sitting on your lap with a steel bar to change the notes. Most of the strings were broken. I bought new strings for it and tried to learn some cords. But the strings sat too high to play fingered cords. So I cut down the string supports so I could play cords.

I bought a Pete Seegar Song Book and started learning some cords and some songs. It was a lot of fun. I even used some of those songs to serenade my future bride. I wasn't very good, but I think she did like being serenaded.