Diary of a Player Read Online Free PDF Page B

believe that he could get whatever he really wanted. So, true to form, Papaw kept pushing my parents and convincing them that they
had
to make this happen for me.
    Finally, Hank’s resolve to permanently avoid this punk Paisley kid started to weaken. Hank made a concession. He told my father that his daughter Denise could play guitar well enough to teach a little kid like me, and maybe I could come over if we wanted to try that. And every now and then he would stop by and see how I was doing. And maybe, just maybe, when I got to a level where I needed a little more than just book learning on the instrument, he’d sit down and show me a few things.
    We jumped at the opportunity to get our foot in the Goddard family home, so my dad started bringing me down to their house after school on Tuesdays for a thirty-minute guitar lesson. The first time, my father went off on an errand in town and came right back. Well, it didn’t take too long before my dad realized that he didn’t need to come back for at least an hour or so, if he didn’t just want to wait around. After Hank’s daughter would give me a lesson, Hank himself would casually wander by, take a quick listen, and then sit down and start working with me himself.
    Here’s how my dad remembers things from those days: “Suddenly, it would be around eight o’clock at night, and I would be trying to get Brad home to do his homework. Meanwhile, Hank’s wife is trying to run Brad off because it’s getting late. But even with the clock ticking, you just couldn’t break those two up when they started jamming.”
    Having a guitar teacher like Hank Goddard would have been more than enough good fortune for any young player in the world. Yet somehow my luck didn’t stop there. Almost right away, Hank Goddard became not just my greatest guitar teacher and my musical mentor but my bandleader.
    And it all began at that church picnic. I was asked to play a few songs after the way I rocked the house of God with that first performance. By this time, Hank and I were getting to be fast friends, so I’m sure just to be nice, Hank said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll get Gene Elliott to get his drums back out. We can put a little band together for this picnic.” Gene was a man in his fifties then who hadn’t played in a while. “And maybe Dick Ward will dust off his old guitar and Tom Berisford can bring his bass, and I’ll play too.” So suddenly I’m playing the big church picnic with not only my guitar teacher but also these other veteran musicians—a band of brothers, or rather, a band of grandpas.
    We learned ten songs for the church picnic—at least I did, because all these older guys already knew every song in the book, and a few that never made it to the book too. Right from the start, I was just this young whippersnapper trying his best to keep up with these guys. I would sing simple country songs, and Hank would play these ridiculously complicated jazzy instrumentals, like “Cherokee” or “Birth of the Blues.”
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    Suddenly I’m playing the big church picnic with not only my guitar teacher but also these other veteran musicians—a band of brothers, or rather, a band of grandpas.
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    Hank taught me by example, and that was true onstage and off. Despite his obvious talent as a musician, Hank was the kindest man imaginable. I look back at old videotapes of me playing in the band with Hank, and I still can’t believe that he and the guys put up with me. By that time I was playing a cheap Hondo Strat copy—yet another in a series of terrible guitars that I played in the beginning. As much as I would have loved something like an actual Fender or Gibson, we just weren’t made of money. Finally, I got a Tokai Strat, and that was as close to the real thing as it got for me in 1985. I didn’t get my first actual Fender until high school, I