In 1970, our family lived in East Point, Georgia, a community ironically to the west of Atlanta. My father had taken what would end up being a short-lived post as senior pastor of an older church there. We moved into a house twice as large as the one we’d left behind in Lexington; we even had a spacious basement, a separate TV room off the kitchen, and a huge back yard – but I still had to share a bedroom with my little brother.
One day, Dad brought home something utterly unexpected: an acoustic guitar. This was wildly out of character.
Specifically, he brought home a Yamaha G-60 classical guitar, rather than a conventional acoustic guitar. The difference is nylon strings, which classical guitars require, as opposed to steel/nickel strings.
Dad aspired to learn to play it, but never got around to it. I, on the other hand...
I asked permission, and was allowed to experiment with the guitar, as long as I was extra-careful and didn’t ding it on anything.
I was 9 years old at the time. We would soon pull up stakes again and move to Crawfordsville, where I would obtain a book of guitar chords and dig into the instrument in earnest.
This we did, and my most prominent memory of those early days, struggling to learn chords, was the sheer pain of my small 9-year-old fingers pressing into hard nylon. I toughed it out, however, and managed to work my way through all the beginner positions: C, G, D, E, no-bar F, no-bar G, scrunchy A, and finally bar-F and bar-G. Once my fingers were toughened up, I then advanced to all the minors and 7ths, and finally to the second-position chords.
I have three prominent memories of that phase of my musical life. The first was my discovery of the neighborhood Boys’ Club, a YMCA recreational center just a block from our house. What was great about the Boys’ Club, where I would hang out every Saturday morning, was that they played secular AM pop radio, which was never heard in our home. I was loving the stuff I was hearing over the Boys’ Club intercom every weekend...
...including the #1 song of 1971 – George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”.
“My Sweet Lord”, a pop hymn based on Vedic prayer, was the first song by an ex-Beatle to go to #1, and George Harrison’s most successful song, by far.1
The song had been released almost as our plane landed in Indiana just before Christmas 1970, and it came up on the Boys’ Club radio constantly. I fell in love with the song. I didn’t know George Harrison had been a Beatle, and it wouldn’t have mattered either way, as I didn’t know any of their songs.
Thinking it was a Christian song, I walked to the music store and bought the sheet music, complete with guitar chords, with my allowance. I figured I could get away with a pop radio song if it had God in the title, right?
My parents quickly realized that it was not a Christian song, but a celebration of the Hindu god Krishna – if anything, it was much worse than a conventional pop song would have been. On the other hand, there I was, as excited as could be, teaching myself an instrument, learning bar-F#m and bar-B, fighting through the pain – and they didn’t have the heart to shut me down. They patiently explained to me what “Hare Krishna” meant, saw that I didn’t get it in any case, and let it go.
These are the same parents who three years ago had refused to let me watch the Saturday morning Beatles cartoon. I count that as progress.
The next memory of that guitar pushes through some mild embarrassment. My parents’ secular music aversion relented in two areas: they were fond of the theme from Dr. Zhivago, and they enjoyed adult contemporary. In the latter category arrived a Bobby Goldsboro song – remember Bobby Goldsboro? - “Watching Scotty Grow”.
I’d endured scores of humiliations already in my young life, but “Watching Scotty Grow” was more than I could stand. The song is a maudlin celebration of a young father of his onesie-wearing son –
There he sits with a pen and a yellow pad,
What a handsome lad - that’s my boy!
At this moment in time, I had just turned 10. I could hit a baseball and ride my bike to the mall and back. Geez.
But Dad had bought the 45 single of this wretched tune, and I had a record player...
I put the song on and began to suss out the chords without sheet music. I began to play by ear. That was a game-changer. A life-changer, even.
Finally, there was in those days a Christian singer with the unusual name of Evie. A mere 16 years old at the time, she generated a hit Christian song - “Pass It On” - which my mother took a liking to. My father had a great idea: we could learn the song as a family, and perform it in a church service – with myself as accompanist, playing the tune on guitar.
This we did. The song has only a handful of chords, and the most difficult – F#m – I had already mastered from my “My Sweet Lord” encounter.
It was my first public performance as a musician, not counting excruciating children’s choir ordeals.
This wasn’t all there was to my Intro to Guitar, mind you: my playing didn’t sound like what I heard in acoustic guitars in songs playing at the Boys’ Club, and I came to realize that this was because Dad’s guitar was a classical guitar, not a steel-string acoustic. Later that year, I borrowed the latter from a church friend, and understood that tone had a lot to do with it, and I had a long way to go – I'd been getting away with my classical playing because no one knew what classical guitar was supposed to sound like.
Dozens of guitars passed through my hands over the years. But when my parents divorced in 1984, Dad’s now-old guitar – which he still had never picked up again – was in his study at his then-church parsonage. I saw it, walked in, and took it. He didn’t object.
As I sit writing this, in August 2020, it is sitting on my couch, 10 feet away.
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