Going For A Song: Early Days 1

["Going For A Song: Early Days" is the opening series from the story of my journey into music, from my early twenties and since. If all goes well, other "Going For A Song" eras, after "Early Days", will be posted later on this blog]
When I bought my first guitar ever, a short time after I arrived in Canada, at twenty, I wanted to play guitar and I wanted to
sing, but I didn't know it would lead me to my first love as a creative artist, the making of songs. A first guitar may not sound like a big thing to someone brought up in North America, where pianos and guitars are fixtures in many homes, and often
just sit there without being played. To me, it was a significant event in my life. It was something I had wanted to own and spend time with, for a long time. Lack of money and the sense of the frivolousness of acquiring such a thing, when there
were so many other needs requiring whatever money was available, had blocked me doing anything about it previously.
Coming to Canada, loosened up my inhibitions about spending money, because there was now a sense that "there would be
more where that came from". Even so, my first guitar was what the young wags in Guyana would have called "a piece of
fire wood", that is to say, a cheap guitar. I can't remember how much it cost. I am tempted to say five dollars, to fulfill the
legend of the dirt cheap first guitar, but I think it was more than that. However, I actually did buy it from a pawn shop. It was
black, verging on a billious yellow around the sound hole. The strings felt as if they were an inch above the fret board, when
you tried to press them down with the left hand. Its sound was like that of a large ukelele that had been left out on a beach
in Hawaii, a few years too long. Regardless of the mainly muscular difficulties in coaxing some sounds out of my new "axe",
as they were called in those days, the acquiring of this crude little instrument, activated the start of my musical life, not at the age of Suzuki method baby violin virtuosos, but at the grand old age of twenty plus. With the help of a book of chords,
I returned to G, D7th, and C, someone had once shown me. I soon found that these chords seemed to fit more songs than I had thought they would. Soon I was asked by relatives and friends to sing at parties, and not long after that, formed a trio
with a mandoline and guitar player, who was a relative, and a bongo drummer from Jamaica.