I grew up in the Boston area during the 1960s and 70s, the middle of 5 kids. My parents were fans of Big Band music, and often had music playing at home and in the car. People like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Patsy Cline, and more. My dad was a self-taught piano player, who could play the melody for almost any song he knew. He was NOT a fan of Rock and Roll, largely due to Elvis more-or-less replacing Big Band as the new popular music. To my dad, it was an end to an era he loved. My mom, however, liked a good dance beat and was a closet rock and roll fan. She actually bought me my first Beatles album and portable record player when I was a teenager…

While attending college at UNH in the late 1970s, I picked up my first acoustic guitar (Yamaha FG250) and practiced after classes to learn how to play it. For a nice sounding guitar, it was really difficult to play cleanly, and it took me months of sore fingers before I figured out how to play smoothly. There was no internet with instructional videos. To learn chords, I bought a used songbook of popular songs that had chord diagrams above the lyrics. Eventually, I would listen to songs on my turntable or cassette deck and work out the chords by ear, pausing and repeating until it sounded right.