Blake D. Stewart - Grandpa's Gift

When I was growing up, my mother's father lived two blocks away. This Grandpa (Peterson) played guitar and sang at all family gatherings and camping and hunting and fishing trips. He played a ukulele as well and showed me some chords about the time I was 8 or 9 years old. I could play along with him at family campfires by 4th or 5th grade.

My father (Santa Clause) got me a used Silvertone (Sears) accoustic guitar when I was 12 years old. It was broken where the neck meets the body and the heel was a quarter to a half and inch away from the body, leaving the steel strings with much to high of an action to play. I fiddled around with it off and on, mostly picking out bass lines from early 60's rock songs such as "Hungry" by Paul Revere and the Raiders. Once or twice I had a neighbor's electric guitar in my hands and I strummed four strings using ukulele positions and discovered that I already could kind of play the guitar.

My sophomore year after I'd turned 15 my grandfather called my house (two blocks away) and told my mom to have me come down. He had something to show me. I went down. He and Grandma Peterson had just come home from a trip to visit my cousins that lived in Scottsdale Arizona. When I got to the house he showed me an old used brown burst Harmony F-hole guitar. He handed it to me and I played with it for some time, perhaps a half hour or more. This whole time I was thinking "Grandpa finally got a new guitar," his old one he'd had since the 1920's or 30's. It was a little parlor sized guitar from a catalog. (Sears - Montgomery Ward - whatever). I reached to hand this "new" Harmony back to him and he said something that I couldn't make sense of in my head. It was something about "why don't you take it home and play it" and "I've already got a guitar, this one’s for you." I don't think I fully comprehended that grandpa had given me the guitar for several hours, maybe days.

Well, with Mel Bay Chord book in hand and a copy of the sound track to Hard Day’s Night and Help, I started to learn the guitar. I'd had 7 years of piano lessons and I'd played French Horn in the school band from 7th grade until that time, but I mostly learn guitar by ear and chord book. I started singing my own song creations when I was 7 or 8 years old. I started writing down lyrics and chords, making up my own songs within weeks of getting that old Harmony F-hole guitar.