Musical instruments

We're at the point, after two terms, in my piano lessons when it's getting really interesting, both in terms of theory and playing. At last! I'm loving it.

I've been thinking about my musical background. Here's a short history.

• My Gene Autry Guitar. We begin when I get a Gene Autry guitar for Xmas when I'm 8 or 10. The cowboy and Champion on it, a lasso going up the neck. Alas, guitar lessons came with it and I almost quit because these were "classical" guitar lessons, learning scales and such, and all I wanted to do was play cowboy songs. I quit. Later I got a book called How to Play the Guitar in Five Minutes and taught myself over the next several years. My brother can remember crying when I sang cowboy songs. Later I got interested in folk music ala Pete Seeger and the Weavers.
• Five-string Banjo. I don't recall when I got my first one. Before I went into the Army because I had one in Berkeley as a street person and took it with me into the military. I learned on Pete Seeger's book, which actually gave me some bad habits for expanding my style later. Through the Army, then, I mostly played 5-string, Seeger-style.
• Blues guitar. I traded the banjo for a guitar later in the Army and picked up a finger-picking blues style ala Brownie McGhee. I continued this style as a civilian and in L.A., meeting L.A. friends and playing music with them. In those days I took my guitar everywhere.
• 12-string guitar. As a graduate student, I stepped into an elevator and joined a professor I knew, a folk musician. He needed immediate cash for a tax problem and offered me the 12-string I used to play at his parties for a great price. I took it (I was wealthy as a grad student, as explained here before). Thereafter, for years and years, for decades, the 12-string became my primary instrument.
• Harmonica. I added harmonica on a rack sometime in grad school, can't recall exactly when. My model for this style was early Ramblin' Jack Elliott (not Dylan!), and of course Woody Guthrie. This was the combination I used for my Guthrie show, which I assembled in the late 1970s. I wrote a lot of humorous talkin' blues with this combination as well. But after I returned west after a divorce, settling in in Portland, I stopped taking my guitar everywhere. Prior to this, in L.A., in Eugene, in Salisbury, Maryland, I took my guitar everywhere. We were inseparable. In Portland, I focused on my playwriting career and dropped the musical appendage.
• Piano. I had a brief flirtation with piano in Salisbury because at a gas station I met a guy taking a piano to the dump. I had him deliver it to me instead. I got someone to tune it and then tried to learn it, making a bit of progress but not much. Mainly it was used by a boogie-woogie piano playing friend at our constant parties.
• Return to 5-string. A few years ago I bought myself a Derring Goodtime 5-string banjo, though I've mainly just fiddled with it.
• Piano lessons. And I recently began piano lessons, primarily to gain literacy for writing music drama / chamber opera scripts with musical lines.
• Clawhammer ukulele. This is my recent obsession. I have friends in L.A. and Idaho who have gone ukulele crazy. So I've been looking into it and discovered this odd, rare style of playing it like a 5-string, clawhammer ukulele, and I absolutely love this sound! Like a very early banjo. Very very old-timey. It goes without saying that I'll be picking up a uke soon and teaching myself clawhammer ukulele. You can count on it.

Can't you see a clawhammer ukulele chamber opera in the works!?