I was always preoccupied with music. An old, broken down guitar stood behind a door near the piano in our apartment in The Bronx. It even had a few strings on it that I loved to strum. At age 6, I decided that I wanted to learn to play it since my older brother was already learning the piano. My parents were disappointed that I didn’t pick something orchestral but it was a tradition in our family that at age 6, the kids were asked what instrument they wanted to learn. My parents decided to allow it but stipulated that I had to learn to read notes, “just like a real musician.”

So, my dad took the old guitar to a music store to get fixed up but it was beyond help. Instead, he came back with a used Harmony arch-top in a canvas bag, complete with flat pick, book, and a six-note pitch-pipe. The store man even tuned it so I’d never have to.

That was 1952, the year Dad had a heart attack and life changed for a while. Music lessons had to be set aside but, after a year, Dad was back at work and Mom enrolled my older brother and me in the Elston School of Music. It was in a big, old house within walking distance from home. Three dollars and fifty cents a week was a big financial commitment so I had to promise that I’d practice at least half an hour every day.

When my teacher, Mrs. Sadolsky, left the Elston School I moved on, too. By then I was eight and took the #38 bus every Saturday morning to Ronny Lee’s home on the Grand Concourse for lessons.

It was tough on Ronny though. He was a working player and a staunch union man with the American Federation of Musicians, local 802. Ronny worked Friday and Saturday nights doing club dates and society orchestras. Most early Saturday mornings he didn’t seem too awake, but he was a patient and kind teacher and a superb jazz player on his big D’Angelico arch-top. But my musical interests leaned in other directions. I wanted to get back to classical and folk music so Ronny and I eventually parted ways.

By 1957, when I was eleven and had already been playing for four years, my parents trusted that I’d stick with it and needed a better instrument. One Saturday morning, Dad and I took the subway to the big G. Schirmer and Sons music store in Manhattan to look at new guitars. We returned with a Goya G-10 and my finger style playing finally started to develop. Then, in 1959 I added banjo with the help of mimeographed instructions from Pete Seeger.

The world of music was and still is tribal. Some classical players believe that it's their ‘duty’ to ‘rescue’ the guitar from the hands of ‘inferior’ players’. Self-taught traditional players often see the classicists as effete snobs. The jazz players can't be bothered with such provincial attitudes but look down their noses at any player who’d stoop to use a capo which they call ‘a cheater’. Some hollow body players claim that solid body guitars are nothing but toys. The same destructive nonsense where 4 string banjo players don’t congregate with 5 string players is still around.

I couldn’t tell my classical teacher that I loved folk music, too. He would have immediately dismissed me. But when I hung around the Washington Square Park fountain on Sundays to share folk music, I was branded an outsider with my obviously classical technique.

But I listened to everything and experimented with much of it through the 1960s. I heard Puerto Rican and Italian street musicians, Reverend Gary Davis who also lived in The Bronx, rehearsals of the New York Philharmonic that I could attend through family connections. I heard Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Josh White, Theodore Bikel, Cisco Houston, and many others at hootenannies and other small venues. There were Cuban tres players at Katherine Dunham’s dance studio in Harlem where I accompanied dance classes. All of it went into developing my musical tastes which became even more eclectic. Through the 1960s, I hung out in recording studios, Greenwich Village coffee houses, folk festivals and friend’s houses and loved it all.

In 1966 on a visit to a friend’s house, I first heard a wonderful recording on an obscure label named Folk Legacy. On a lark, we borrowed his dad’s car and drove to the town of Hanksville, Vermont to find Folk Legacy Records. We were welcomed and I returned the next summer to work as painter / kid wrangler / office assistant/ instrument repairman / and assistant chief cook and bottle washer with Sandy and Caroline Paton, proprietors of Folk Legacy Records. The connections I made there opened many avenues of music and friendship that altered my life to this day.

In the late 1960s, Paula Ballan’s Manhattan apartment was a gathering spot for musicians from all over. Paula suggested that I visit Steve Goodman who was in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center hospital for leukemia treatment and was alone in New York. Stevie’s diagnosis was recent and the shock of it impelled him to start writing songs. We’d sit on his bed and play our guitars for as long as he could stand it. Steve introduced me to Bonnie Koloc who hired me to accompany her for a couple of long engagements at The Earl of Old Town in Chicago.

Paula and her roommates would throw wonderful parties at the drop of a hat. It was there I met John Bassett who had been the folk singer in Sammy Davis Junior’s touring troupe. After playing together for an evening, he invited me to join him as accompanist on a Midwest tour that he was setting up so off I went. The day of my college graduation, we were the headliner act at Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley’s coffee house hangout, The Vanguard, in Kansas City.

That tour lasted for almost a year before I realized that I didn’t like being on the road. What appeared glamorous at the outset wasn’t sustainable and the glamour was chimerical. I came home pale, slightly green, and exhausted from a year of night work, no sun and bad food.

Worst of all was the isolation. Human contact is superficial when you’re always leaving. We were either celebrities or pariahs, never just folks. It felt like a twilight existence where everybody either wanted something from us or reviled us. Maintaining safe emotional distance became habitual and made real relationships rare.

The time had come to settle down away from touring. Family, children, and real life were the order of the day. There were occasional recording dates or dances to play for, but repairing stringed instruments was what I did for a living. I became skilled at losing money making Mount Lebanon banjos in my barn in upstate New York.

Eventually, the family moved to California where I went to medical school while struggling to keep the family afloat. School morphed into a profession and I spent the most of the 1980s wearing a white coat. Music was relegated to low priority but never went away entirely. Once in a while it became too insistent to ignore.

Painful life changes ensued in the 1990s and I wound up in Northern California, trying to rebuild. Music came to the rescue once again. I eventually joined Irish band, Atlantic Shore, taught at music camps, took on students, and sang with a trio named Mudlark, and toured Ireland with the a capella choir, Vocal Arts Ensemble, to keep my hand in.

These days, in my dotage, I still coach students, do studio work, accompaniment, and production. Meeting other players and sharing music with them is still my joy.