Leisure: String 'Em Up

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When the sun rose this morning, I was feeling mighty bad, My baby said good morning—Hell, it made me mad Because I was evil, evil-hearted me.

I'm just downright evil, evil as a man can be.

Guitar atwangle, eyes aimed into a far corner, the voice pitched in a keening wail, the singer holds the rapt attention of the shaggy boys, girls and dogs scattered around his Greenwich Village pad. In a campus dormitory in Ohio, in a café alonng San Francisco's North Beach, in a living room in upper-class Grosse Pointe, Mich., other singers with guitars chant tales of tragic love. In fact, all over the U.S., people of all descriptions—young and middleaged, students, doctors, lawyers, farmers, cops—are plucking guitars and moaning folk songs, happily discovering that they can amuse both themselves and their friends. The guitar has become a ready and easy form of home entertainment, cheaper than cocktails and more sociable than TV watching.

Slow Start. The boom in guitar playing started slowly about five years ago. Some credit the flood of new records, where listeners learned from Andrés Segovia what range the guitar was capable of. There was Burl Ives and then Elvis Presley to prove that anyone could play. And along came the records of such beguiling folk singers as Woody Guthrie, Richard Dyer-Bennet and Pete Seeger.

At Eddie Bell's Guitar Headquarters in Manhattan, sales have increased some 400% in the last ten years; sheet-music sales for the guitar are up about 200% at Schirmer's in New York. The University of California at Berkeley boasts about 400 guitar students. Beverly Hills High School offers a class in the subject. More than half of the 400 students at the Boston School of Music are studying the guitar. Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music has more than 100 guitar students ranging in age from ten to 70. Only last week, six Peace Corpsmen, bound for Nigeria, startled their boss R. Sargent Shriver, by unleashing their guitars for an impromptu serenade.

The guitar has obvious advantages. For one thing, the beginner can learn a few simple chords in a few minutes, and that entitles him to entertain his friends. The guitar is more portable than the piano, more civilized than the accordion; it looks good on girls and dashing on boys. And best of all, it has a plaintive beauty and warm tone even when played in an elementary fashion.

Rebel Yell. The folk-song guitar's appeal is chiefly to the young, who have branched out from the standard English and American ballads to the blues (whose high priest is Josh White), labor union songs, Scottish and Irish ballads (Annie Laurie, Cockles and Mussels), and international songs (of which Theodore Bikel is the exemplar). The songs, says one aficionado earnestly, "are a fine way to tell about yourself. Almost nobody has the words to really talk about their lives. With the guitar and some old songs, you can hint about it though."

Even for a bank president or an adman, there is a kind of bittersweet and earthy sense of participating in the past when he hikes up his ol' guitar, puts one leg up on a chair, tunes up his face to consecrated mournfulness and sings:

That's the Rebel Girl, that's the Rebel

Girl. To the working class she's a precious

pearl.