"I remember sitting on the front step at the house I grew up in playing a guitar that my cousin Gary had given me. It was a real beater and he fixed it up for me. He used strips of a plastic bleach bottle to replace the missing binding and other magical ideas to hold the old guitar together. He got it from his girl friend. I can’t remember her name but she was really something and I was very grateful. I loved it. I played away on the strings of the born again guitar and was looking through a songbook that a friend had lent to me, playing bits and pieces of the songs I knew. It was a collection of popular folk songs and it had guitar chord charts that showed you where to put your fingers. That was always helpful because the chords I knew at the time, I could count on one hand. I couldn’t read music, still cant. When I came across the song, “Moon River”, I stopped and played it through as best I could. It was one of those songs that always stole my attention no matter what I was doing or where I was. I played it through over and over and sang it softly to my self. It seemed magical to me like a dream I had once but couldn’t remember much about. I wondered where this Moon River was. How did it come to deserve such acclaim. Perhaps, only a flash card memory of some romantic black and white from years before. A calm waterway that reflects its namesake on clear nights. Shimmering trickery that catches the imagination of all those melancholy that witness it or hear about it in a song. I guess all rivers are Moon Rivers with the right witness on a clear night. I really like that song.

I was sixteen years old and craving anything that had to do with folk music. I had a summer job on the railroad and used to take the bus to get there. There were music stores along the way and sometimes I would jump off the bus just to flip through the records. Jim Croche, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Lightfoot …I was so into these songs and my guitar and the fantasy of being just like them, a song writer. All to often I would go A.W.O.L. and drift around the city from music store to music store, guitar store to guitar store. It was a dimension I shared with no one. Not that nobody was aloud in just that nobody I knew felt the same about folk music or at least nobody told me. The person I identified with most at that time was my cousin Gary Davis. He was great. He played the pubs in Montreal, the Irish pubs and anywhere else that was paying I guess. He knew just about every folk song there was and he was a master guitar player but most of all he was my best friend at a sharp right angle turn in my life. He was the real thing …smoked, drank lived a nocturnal life and had the kindest disposition in the world. Everyone who knew Gary loved him. You could put your sword and shield down when you sat with Gary. Guaranteed, he’d make you laugh. He could make a hangman laugh. As great a character as he was a guitar player. My Mom and Dad let me use the car sometimes to go see Gary play. I often gave him a lift to the gigs and helped him carry his stuff in, set up and stay until the show was over. I remember feeling some proud that he was my cousin. He was quite a bit older than me. I sometimes wondered if he was putting up with me. He was always good to me. He was my hero. Mom always waited up. I’d sit at the foot of her bed and tell her all about the night. In the wee hours of the morning I’d curled up in my bed with my mind filled with images and the characters from the songs Gary played. I remember picturing a wiry man wearing a baggy shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow lying amongst the twisted iron and steam after the wreck of the old 97. Every song had different characters that existed only in my mind. I’d come to know them all but only in my imagination. Not just people but little white clouds that cry, a dog named Shep, and the poor bear that Davy Crocket killed. My mind was a one hundred screen theatre and the movies were folk songs on endless reels. I was a happy boy.

My concert hall was my bedroom. I spent countless hours sitting on my bed playing all the songs I knew. Some, over and over again. It’s a wonder my folks didn’t go crazy. I had rabbit skins and antlers on the walls, an old Cooey .22, a pellet gun and a fantastic print of an Indian on horse back looking behind him. I spent a lot of time wondering what he was looking at. What he was looking at was more interesting that the picture it self. Was he hunting and heard something? Was he being followed or was he lost? Each possibility played out in my mind. Fantasy was everywhere. In folk songs, old photographs and paintings and the stories my elders told me but that’s a book in it’s self and a thousand folk songs.”

Andy McGaw