Repertoire

The handmade instrument festival always sparks a new ambition in regards to my guitar playing. Mostly I want to come home and yell at mine -- Traitor! How come you don't make me sound like those guys?

Don't you love people like that? Nothing is ever their fault, no matter what? They have an open account at the scapegoat store ... Got drunk and plowed into a herd of nuns on the sidewalk? Not my fault -- it was dark, they were wearing black, and there's not usually anybody on the sidewalk that time of morning ...

Um. Back to the subject at hand, which was ... ? Ah, guitar. So, inspired by excellence and knowing that it's beyond me but you gotta try, I decided to add a couple new pieces to my -- pardon the expression -- repertoire.

Something of problem. I now have enough of that so that adding something on one end is apt to make something go away on the other. I generally practice for an hour, maybe ninety minutes, and that's not enough time to play everything I have memorized, so either I have to rotate through a list and hit stuff every third day, or I won't keep it. I know guys who have five hundred songs at their beck, but it ain't me, babe.

Anyhow, the two new pieces upon which I am laboring are "Suicide is Painless," (the theme from M*A*S*H) and an old tune by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey, "Delta Dawn." There are several covers of the latter -- most notably by Helen Reddy, in 1973, when it reached #1 on the charts late that summer. This one is easy to play, simple chords, so it's not much of a stretch.

Why those two?

Seemed like a good idea at the time ...