Ah well.... Once I started paying serious attention to music I quickly started pay particular attention to the guitar. It didn't really occur to me that a person could get a guitar and start playing it - it seemed to be an activity for some special sort of person who had some kind of magical knowledge.
Then round about the same time I met one person who played and found out that another, who I'd known for a while could play guitar. One was bloke named Stan who was lodging with friends of my Dad's. The second was a bloked named Les who was my Sunday school teacher. Stan used to play Dylan songs for anybody who would listen. Les picked up a guitar at a get together one night and played "Dixie" ("I wish I was in Dixie. Away! Away!"). This was getting interesting. Then Stan showed me the time honoured C, G and D and I started to think that maybe this was something I could do - If I had the money to get a guitar. Which I didn't. But soon after I left school and got a job and now I could afford it. So I'd suppose that at this time my inspiration was Dylan, probably "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall". (which was in D, not G, but that was a detail and I soon learned an A chord)
That lasted a couple of years (apart from a quick jam of Neil Young's "Ohio" with the Asylum Kids one afternoon - knew the verse but not the chorus so....). Then another couple of years later I got an electric (and a way cool chorus pedal that I wish I still had) and played religious music in a band for a while, but more as a form of devotional service than for getting my own jollies, and we played no secular music. Then that too passed and I sold off all my gear and didn't much think about playing guitar for years though I kept on listening.
Then round about 2005 or 2006 I suddenly got an itch. I can identify the song, but I can't identify why it made me want to pick up a guitar and I've never actually played that song. It was
Norma Waterson's recording of the Grateful Dead song "Black Muddy River". Dunno... certainly a fine performance and with great backing by Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, Danny Thompson and Eliza Carthy, but I can't say what it was about that that made me want to have a guitar again, but I know that it did have that effect.
So there you go. Makes no real sense, but then it doesn't have to.
