I was 6 years old when Johnny Cash’s live album At Folsom Prison was released. While it was my parents’ album, I listened to it almost all the time. Folsom Prison Blues isn’t a kid’s song, but it became one of my favorites. At the time, I wasn’t playing the piano. Mom might have started me on lessons a couple of times by then, but I never practiced and didn’t retain enough to say that I knew anything about playing piano.
I don’t know what prompted me to sit down at the piano and pick out Folsom Prison Blues but one day it just happened. I picked out the melody with my right hand. Somehow, I discovered chords to play with my left hand. At that time, I don’t think I understood what a chord was. It was a process of picking around on the keyboard until I found three or four notes that sounded right with the melody I was playing at the time. The playing with my left hand was simple. Although I didn’t really think about it at the time, I was hitting the chord on each beat of the 4/4 measure. The melody wasn’t bluesy at all. My version of the sound had no soul at all. But I was playing well enough that people could recognize what I was playing. This was the next step in my evolution as a musician.