Meeting my Guitar

and discovering treasure

Guitar image from Substack AI

The year I tuned 11, I received a very special birthday present: a guitar. It was slightly smaller than a full size guitar, which fit me perfectly, as I was slightly smaller than a full-sized girl and not yet a woman. 

The guitar was beautiful: I held it in my arms like a baby, and strummed the strings. I knew nothing about tuning or chords, or how to play a song. It was a transparent treasure chest: I knew what the treasure was but didn’t yet have the key to make the treasure sing. After a few weeks of alternating frustration and rapture, I was able to start taking lessons. Although I had played recorder for years, even making one of my very own from bamboo in a summer school class, GUITAR became my spirit animal, my soul mate, my heart. I could sing and make pretty music at the same time. 

After the first lesson, I had learned three chords, owned sheet music for 5 contemporary folk songs, and knew how to tune my six crisp, taut nylon strings. Within a couple of days, my finger tips were blistering from pressing down on those nylon strings for too much time to begin with. I couldn’t pace myself. But I was in heaven. I came home eagerly after school so I could play my guitar. I couldn’t WAIT for the next week’s class. 

Taking lessons was also a way for this shy young girl to get to know some of the other kids in my new school, who were also taking classes with me once a week. After school we would lug our bulky guitars in their hard shell cases across the big grass field that separated the school playground from the outer baseball fields. Beyond the fields and the walking path was the public park, and eventually we’d reach the crosswalk at the corner where the grocery store started the row of shops that made up the village commercial centre. 

When we crossed the street, we were now off the school grounds and our musical freedom began. We entered a small shopfront, walked down a hall into a tiny room that had just enough space for seven of us sitting on folding chairs in a couple of rows, with music stands to hold our sheet music. Our teacher sat facing us, almost knee to knee if you sat in the front row. 

Each week we all tuned our strings together, started with some warm up exercises, and played the songs we had been working on since the previous week. Then we would start learning the new music and fumble several times through the different chord progressions and tricky chord changes. The learning part of the lesson was acoustically painful. How our teacher managed not to scream in frustration sequestered in that tiny little room, I have no idea.

I still have many of my original smudged mimeographed music sheets from those lessons, so many decades ago. Even the songs I didn’t like very much, I played over and over just so I could practice. Each week I leaned new strums, and how to finger notes along with the melody. I learned songs for which I didn’t have the music by sounding them out. I was soaking up every note of every lesson, and eager for more.

“Let’s Get Together,” written by Chester Powers

After only a few months, I had a huge ring binder filled with songs. I had soared from an invisible launch pad to discover a kind of joy and creativity and exploration I’d never felt before. Now I knew my classmates in a different way: I played guitar, sang, and played music with everyone. I hung out with kids that didn’t involve being in the cool group, or looking a certain way, or having to navigate the other teen rules I still had yet to decode.  

I mostly played my guitar with a small group of girls. But I also played in a school group accompanying the next choral recital, I played with some of the scary, rumoured-to-be-drug-taking kids, I played with my church in a newly formed folk mass group: I played with ANYONE I could join. I also composed a few songs, one of which I sang with my girl group at a school recital. 

Many years later, when I had taken a year off from University and was living and working in London, I started suffering from a case of mild depression. After trying various things, I realised that bringing more music into my life was possibly something that could get me back in gear. I found a cheap guitar at a nearby music store and started playing music again. I transcribed a whole album of Joan Baez folk songs from her first album I had on a tape cassette; it was one of the first albums that I absorbed as a young girl. My father loved Joan Baez’s voice and played this record when he could. (My mother had all the musical soundtracks so he had to fit his choices in around hers.)

Original Joan Baez album, called Joan Baez, 1960

Many of the songs on this Joan Baez album derive from very old English and Scottish ballads that had centuries before been exported to the southern United States. These older versions had stayed relatively intact in isolated Appalachian mountain villages. These were the versions that Joan Baez recorded, just her and her guitar.

Somehow singing these songs whilst living close to the castles and battlements that had been the sites of the song’s origins created a connection and provided a comfort to my heart. I might have felt sad, but it was nothing compared to what many of the women in these songs had gone through. Bringing those laments into and through my body while belting them out through the vibrations of my voice and breath worked magic on my temperament and my mood improved.

My vocal range was not nearly as wide or high as Joan’s, nor did I have the clarity or power of her voice. But I learned new folk music strums and practiced them over and over. Once again, I played this music for hours and hours to slowly work the sad and tired and darkness out of my body.

A few years ago, my son rescued many of my records and has digitally recorded some of them for me to enjoy again. The first one I asked him to find and record was my beloved Joan Baez album. He did, and I can now listen to it pretty much as I originally heard it, complete with the delightful scratchiness of well-loved vinyl.

Here is one of the traditional songs from the album, John Riley, and I am sorry it does not come with the original scratchiness. It was one of the more romantic ones that had me enthralled as a young girl believing in true, very romantic love.

I am blessed to have grown up listening to many amazing women singer-songwriters. Their music provided surprising and unexpected keys to the treasure of my guitar, which in turn led to my shy way to meet new people, as well as a route to improved mental health. These musicians also taught me a way to connect with history that made sense, using stories of individual struggles and personal relationships, rather than dates of battles and governments overthrown. It always seems to come down to individual stories to create new understanding and a way forward, doesn’t it?

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Have any of you played an instrument that became meaningful in other ways besides ‘just’ playing music? Were there specific musicians whose music inspired you in any way? I know there are more than a few of you readers who are proper musicians, and I’d love to hear what being a musician has meant to you. And for the rest of us, how has being able to play music helped you? Or did it? Is it something you have stayed with or given up? Or taken up later in life?

Also, do you like history? Are there particular ways of learning history that resonate more with you? I’d love to hear!

Many thanks as always for reading along this week. I always appreciate you taking time out of your day to be here. ❤️

xoxo Sabrina

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