The Guitar In My Genes

The Guitar in my Genes by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

I’m the girl who always falls for the guitar player. Growing up in the 50s may have done it. My older brother, Jim, taught himself how to play an acoustic, and I listened to him practice well into the night after I’d gone to bed. He didn’t have much of a voice, but he sure could pick those strings; and, since he snuck out his window on Saturday nights to hit the “Village Vanguard” or “The Bitter End,” he was darn good at it. He tuned my acoustic ear and made me love all things guitar, introducing me through the bedroom walls to his LPs of Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Weavers, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez - whose “Copper Kettle” he practiced to perfection on a 12-string. I was one of the few 10 year old girls in New York who took Pete Seeger albums into the listening booth at the local record shop and who saved her allowance to buy Kingston Trio and Limelighter records. I brought my love for acoustic guitar through Catholic high school during a time when the priests began to wear sandals and host folk masses. Guitars were everywhere. My best friend’s dad played old rock ‘n’ roll songs for us after huge Italian dinners and another friend had quit her plaid skirts for jeans and the Village, so I followed her to hear Simon and Garfunkel play off McDougal Street one night without parental or legal permission in 1963. The next year, I became

distraught by my huge attraction to Paul McCartney’s electric guitar when the Beatles arrived. That may explain the paradox of the night I booed Dylan’s electric, second set and walked out of Forest Hills Stadium in ’65 only to start dancing in the streets with all the other naysayers when “Like a Rolling Stone” came pounding through the gates. In college, I fell in love with an East Coast hippie who played his guitar the majority of the time we were together, and my first year as a teacher, I dated the head of the Social Studies Department who played Stephen Stills’ songs in local bars at night. He took me to two of the most stellar guitar moments of my life. The first was a picnic at Doc Watson’s house on Long Island. It started in the morning and every other person there had a guitar. The guests, famous and not, spread out over the huge compound and traded songs until the wee hours of the morning when the entire party picked and sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” We also went on a date to Madison Square Garden’s Winter Festival for Peace in 1970 which lasted all night. Twelve acts performed including Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Blood Sweat and Tears, Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix who blew the roof off the Garden when he appeared on stage at 3 a.m., only to drug out after one song and slide down a huge speaker, passing out for the rest of the set. I fell in love with an air-guitarist who taught our toddler to jump around with Bob Seger, and in his 60s sings with a nationally recognized garage band. I gave birth to a son who still brings me great guitar riffs, like Tim Reynolds’ stellar moments in “Lie in Our Graves” with Dave Matthews. I’ve been fortunate

enough to see Montoya play in a private concert, and I once lost my spirit in a debacle over a book I wrote about Harry Chapin. All these decades later, I am the head of a Performing Arts Department that hosts the most popular course in the school – guitar, taught by a classically trained professional. And still it is the tender riffs of Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, the plaintive strains of Willy Nelson and the raw emotion of Eric Clapton that forces me to pause and be thankful for the soundtrack of my life. Guitar completes me, and perhaps the most telling truth about its place in my genes is my new son-in-law who proposed to our daughter while playing Jack Johnson’s “Question” by a lake in the spring.

My brother was a natural guitarist, though oddly, not a performer. Looking back, it may have been because we came from a family that was always asking us to

perform. My brother did not like live audiences and came to dislike them even more when our mother responded to his polite declinations by complaining that he never played anything she knew anyway. Once, Jim tried to please her and played “Good night Irene” - from that day on it was a constant request that most often got refused.