Someone asked me a question once...

...he said: what was the moment that sits in your mind as the moment you realized the existence of folk music?

On the surface, a pretty simple question requiring only a short scan through some significant memories. He asked the question and all of us (7 around a small table) looked stumped. And while the two people in front of me told their stories, I looked around in my memories for the correct answer...and this was it:

I had a teacher in Grade 8 who scheduled an afternoon of music class for us every Friday. We had a song book of lyrics to a whole bunch of songs, mostly folk songs now that I think back. He would play his guitar and we would sing, songs like Leaving on a Jet Plane and El Paso and The Boxer (with the line about the whores on 7th Avenue taken out). Then one afternoon he closed the blinds in our second floor classroom, turned the lights off, and told us to close our eyes. The room was silent as he put in a tape none of us had heard before. Through the air floated ethereal notes, the ghosts of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. We listened to that song with our eyes closed in the darkness...and tears came unbidden to my eyes. It was then that I saw for the first time the power of music and words, the power of what I would come to know as folk music, to evoke a time and place...and to fill a room with ghosts.