The first record I loved was "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles.  This was around 1960.  We had a party at our house on Gomer Lane in Alverstoke, Hampshire, the south of England, and someone left the 45 rpm disc behind which I started playing on the record player - repeatedly.  It got to me.  I was hooked on the hook.  Around that time by friend Rog Butcher used to bring the Record Mirror to school and we'd look at the Top 50 charts.  He was a pop music know it all, and in his opinion it was all over.  The best had already happened - the best being Buddy Holly, Little Richard, early Ray Charles.  But to me it all sounded good.  I was a person of very little discernment in those days.  Joe Brown's "Picture of You" hit number one.  It was all fun to sing along to.  And singing was something I loved to do.  Back then, in England in the fifties and sixties, people sang a lot.  In church.  Well that was about the only thing in church that was really enjoyable.  Some of the hymns you could really do a number on.  And in the Scouts.  Yes, I was a boy scout.  At the camps, great singalong stuff.  And into this walks Mick Morris with a guitar one day, at my school, Pompey Grammar School, before class, and he's playing "House of the Rising Sun".  Now we're onto a different level.  "You have to listen to this bloke", says Mick,  handing me an album with a picture of a curly headed kid nestled up to a guitar neck with a corduroy cap looking somewhat suspiciously at the photographer, Bob Dylan.  I bought the album.  Seventeen and six it cost, that's seventeen shillings and six pence in the old before decimal money, which would be less than a pound, which exchanged for four dollars and eighty cents then, but I might be making this all up.  This album did not leave the turntable for the next six months.  The "old groaner" my Dad called him.  Didn't sound like that to me though. Just blew me away.  "What is this guy doing?  How is he doing it?"  The guitar clanked, and jangled, and rained harmonious chimes of plangent acoustic texture.  It was mesmerizing.  OK, so now I'm a folk music fan.  And there's folk clubs where you can go and listen to this stuff, and, of course, sing along.  It may have been Phil Williams who took me over to a folk club in Portsmouth, upstairs, above a pub.  Martin Carthy was singing "The Trees They do Grow High", his voice from some ancient woodland glade, girt with the sad resonance and the fleeting beauty of passing seasons and abandoned lovers, the echoes of a thousand years of English romance, chivalry and treachery.  I had to try it.  Mum got me a sweet spanish style nylon stringed guitar and my brother Brodnax taught me a few chords, got a pink Alan Lomax "Teach Yourself Folk Guitar" book, and I'm plunking away, just enough that I can sing a song.
And the Odyssey begins.
You can find my songs on Soundcloud.
Mik W. Moore