My Guitar

When I was at Ponce De Leon Junior High School I had a choice. I could either take shop, band, or chorus. The choice was easy since I had no skills with tools and I had never even held a musical instrument. But I did love to sing. That was back in the days of the Temptations and the Four Tops and those groups made me want to sing. Did I know how to sing? Could I carry a tune? Did I even know what a note was? No, No No. But taking Chorus with Mrs. Rayfield definitely beat band and shop.

Chorus class probably had at least 50 us in there. The girls in the soprano section could sing. Boys like me were assigned to the bass section and mostly we could sing loud. It was a good class. We were taught to read music -- read it enough to know whether to sing at a higher or lower pitch. We were not good at discerning pitches. We either went up or we went down. I loved chorus class. 

That's my musical history. Aside from listening to rocknroll on the radio and tapping my foot to the beat, I had no real training or ability. 

Eons later for no reason I can remember, I decided I wanted to play the guitar. Maybe I was influenced by my brother who seemed to be able to learn the guitar.  But a few years ago while I was living in Bloomington I bought a guitar and asked Charlie Jesseph if he would give me lessons. Charlie was a friend of my daughter and a gifted musician, and apparently he needed money. Let's be honest. I had zero skills. Charlie would play a note and then a higher note and ask me to describe the second note. I could not tell if it was a higher or a lower note. As I said, I had zero musical skills. 

I play an acoustic guitar. I am still taking lessons. Thankfully a teacher named Danny is willing to help me now. The nice thing is that I don't need to know how to read music. Most songs are found on sheets that simply display the chords. Play a G chord here. Then here play an E chord. I have learned some basic chords and I play songs that feature those chords. I stay away from songs that have chords I don't know.

Chords are, therefore, what its all about for me. Chords are not easy. Each chord asks you to put a finger on a particular place on the string. Of course, most chords have at least three notes so that requires you to have at least three fingers touching three strings in specific places. Wow. Talk about yoga for fingers. The fingers are one thing. The brain is the other. Each chord is different so when it says to play a D chord your fingers jump to specific places. Then you might jump to an E chord and you have to remember where your fingers go for the E. I get both hand and mind cramps. Ouch. 

Over these years I have learned to play maybe a dozen songs. Some of my favorites are Save the Last Dance for Me, Love is a Burning Thing, and Take the Load off Fanny. Harder is reading sheet music. I struggle with that. It is not really that hard but it requires memory and I seem to be short on that these days. I don't really need to know how to read sheet music since most guitar songs feature the chords. But it seems like perverse fun to give it a try.