I often get questions about advice on starting out in music but I usually try to abstain; the path in each case is different, and when one considers the thousands of factors involved, it’s not surprising that the process would itself vary wildly and advice is, therefore, a tangle. But the questions continue – just recently from two readers of my SO IT GO column – and I attempt today to respond.
My beginnings in playing music go back to when I was living in Vreed-en-Hoop (I’ve mentioned this before) in a time when the village was a very quiet place after dark. Like most villages in the 1950s, when the sun set, Vreed-en-Hoop virtually shut down. In that setting, two young men playing acoustic guitars, strolling the road, was striking. In the night-time stillness, one could hear the guitars coming a long way off, gradually getting louder as they passed, and then fading away gradually as the strollers moved on.
The players were two brothers, Jack and Joe Henry, both now deceased, and the sound of the guitars was a light coming on for me. I was often in bed when they passed, and I would lay there transfixed. It led to me learning guitar myself and then playing in a group with Jack and Joe; Gerry Martins from Pouderoyen (no family) also played guitar along with a drummer Billy Stephenson, and Dooly Chung playing maracas. I had written one song, a love ballad, but professional musician was nowhere in my mind at any time.
