Before I ever picked up a guitar, I have to go back farther.
When I was about three years old, we lived in a farmhouse in Massachusetts, out in the country near Amherst. I was born in Holyoke Hospital, but my dad was in college at Amherst, and we lived out on Station Road outside of town. Amherst was a beautiful Massachusetts town.
We moved from there when I turned three, so I was probably two and a half, maybe three, when my sister picked me up, set me on her lap, and taught me how to play piano. They were little songs, very simple songs for small children.
When we moved from Massachusetts to northern Texas, my mother bought a piano for my sister. It was a Wurlitzer upright piano. It was not a bad piano. My sister played on it through her adolescence and teens. She took lessons, and she was good. She was a good piano player.
So I sat at that piano when I was three years old, learning how to play, learning about music, and listening to music.
Later, my sister stopped playing the piano, but when I would come home from school and no one was in the house, I would sit at the piano and make up my own songs. I think my mother realized this, so when I was in grade school, she put me into piano lessons.
The lady who taught me lived four or five blocks away from our house, and I would walk over to her house and sit at her piano. I can’t remember her name. She was a nice lady, and my mother paid for the lessons.
The thing was, I played by ear, and I had no desire to learn how to read music. She would put the sheet music in front of me and teach me how to play, thinking I was learning how to read the notes. But I wasn’t. I was listening to her, and then I was repeating what she did on the piano by ear.
I wanted to learn how to play “The Entertainer” by Joplin. I don’t remember his first name. So she got the sheet music, put it up there, pointed at the notes, and played the first part of it. I just mimicked her.
I won a little pin at a piano contest for playing “The Entertainer” by Joplin. I played it all by ear. I couldn’t read a note of it.
The piano, to me, was just a relief. It was the place where this creative musical thing inside of me could come out. I would come home from school, open the door, walk straight to the piano, and start pounding out things on the piano.
Then, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I went to church camp.
They had a little campfire book that had songs in it. In the back of the book were the chords, and on each song were the letters of the chords. I picked up the guitar of one of the guys who was a camp counselor and started putting my fingers where the book said to put them.
And I was playing the guitar.
So I came home and told my mom I wanted a guitar for my birthday. I think I was turning sixteen. She bought me a Hondo acoustic. It was dark purple.
It was not the greatest guitar, but it was a good guitar. It was brand new, and it probably didn’t cost that much. It wasn’t the greatest quality, and because of that, it was very hard to play.
When I learned how to play guitar, I was learning on a hard-to-play guitar. You had to press your fingers down much harder to get a chord to sound. Because of that, your fingers got strong, and they got calloused pretty quickly.
Most people quit playing guitar because it is painful. Even if you take the easiest guitar to play, with soft strings, it is still painful. Pressing down on the chords and continuing to play takes determination and some tolerance for pain.
But after all that time practicing and playing piano by ear, picking up the guitar was a natural fit.
That purple Hondo became the guitar I carried with me. It got beat up a little bit, but I had it with me all the time. We would walk through parks, through alleys, and around with our friends. We walked everywhere, and I had that Hondo strapped over my shoulder, playing the guitar all the time.
So that is where the music story really begins for me.
It began on a piano when I was a little boy, and then it moved on to a hard-to-play, dark purple Hondo acoustic guitar that made my fingers hurt, made my fingers strong, and opened the door for me to start putting music and words together.