J A M B U Z Z !!!!

I just got my youngest son his first mandolin lesson the other day, and I have to say, that we’re both excited. I feel a little bit guilty, like I’ve been pushing him a little hard to play music, and for a while it seemed like it wouldn’t happen. You see, the whole family plays. My wife is a fiddler, I play the accordion, my older son plays harmonica and a little guitar, and my daughter is just vicious on the banjo. So I thought, if I could get my little one a mandolin lesson maybe he’d take to it like the rest of us, and we could all sit around and make music together. But for a while, he would have none of it. No matter how much I offered, he refused to have a mandolin lesson.

What little interest he did have in music, he had in rock and roll. Now, I’ve got no problem with rock, I’ve played it before with friends, but its simply not the kind of music that will teach you how to really play with soul. I remember growing up, fiddling around with an electric guitar, being happy to just play a few chords loudly, and not caring if I ever got good. It’s all ego and raucous noise. Mandolin teaches subtlety, but he had no interest in even trying a guitar lesson, to say nothing of a mandolin lesson.

That all changed one night when the rest of us finally got together. The older one is well on his way to being a good harmonica player and a decent guitarist as well, but he’s still a little shy of playing with other people. He’s sixteen years old and just has his first girlfriend, and they are very much embroiled in first love. I’ve never seen him in such a good mood as coming home that night from his first serious date, and as soon as he got in, he picked up the harp and started to play a tune. The rest of us sort of wondered in and joined one by one, and before you knew it, we were all playing together better than we had before. All, except for the little one who just sort of watched us, wide eyed. The next day, he asked me for that mandolin lesson I’d been talking about. How could I say no? I signed him up with a teacher I knew, but always impatient, he wanted to start right away. I can pick a little, so I gave him his first mandolin lesson my self.

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