Not everyone should take music lessons. There are some that have a hole in their bucket, like me. Mother thought it would be nice if one of her children learned how to play the Hawaiian guitar. Island music was popular back in the days before World War II. She picked the wrong kid, me.

There had been an ad in the newspaper announcing a new music program coming to town. They promised to teach anyone how to play the Hawaiian guitar in twenty-five easy lessons at only two dollars each. They would provide a student guitar, picks, and slide bar as well as the sheet music. What a deal! Mother signed me up. This was before I knew how tone deaf I really was. It turned out that my singing ability was so poor that our dog, Banjo, wouldn't even howl. He just hid in the corner. But I was willing to try.

There were two classes of six students each. We didn't need to learn how to read notes, they said. There was a better method of learning to play the Hawaiian guitar, they said. We would be able to play a tune after our first lesson, they said. The Oahu Method was the way to go, they said. What they said was all wrong. None of us learned a thing except that we weren't cut out to play the Hawaiian guitar. In class, we were to play through the selected song together. Banjo wouldn't have been able to handle that. The teacher said we were doing fine.

The Oahu Method of playing the guitar didn't rely on a musical clef or notes on a printed page. Oh no, numerals would do the trick. The strings were the open spaces between the lines on the paper. In those spaces, instead of notes, numbers were placed to correspond to the strings to be played. Numbers were placed at each fret on the guitar, starting with “1” at the first fret. Sounds simple enough. The tempo of the piece to be played was mostly up to the player. We tapped our feet in unison and started on the teacher's signal. What key was it in? Not important, since the frets were numbered to correspond to the notes. We never learned to play chords. Sharps and flats? We were not to worry about them either. After all, the lessons were only two dollars each. What more would we need?

To tune our guitar we used a very simple method. I never did master it. We were to place the bar on a certain fret and play the two adjacent strings, adjusting the tension on the open string until they sounded alike. That was asking a lot from a tone deaf person like me. We were to continue across the strings, tuning the open string to correspond to the previous one with the bar on it. Problems arose immediately. How was I to know if the base string (the one closest to me) was in tune or not. I tried, the good Lord knows I tried. A strum across the strings of my guitar was not melodious, but grating on the nerves. Some people are not cut out to play.

I took twenty-one lessons on the Hawaiian guitar using the Oahu Method. My favorite song was “Over the Waves.” It was hymn, but I didn't know that. I never once played it all the way through. My tempo was jerky since I needed to look up at the numbers on the sheet music, then down at my guitar to play that note. It was a pitiful sight. No one ever asked me to play the second time.

I would have taken all the lessons of the course, but the two music teachers ran off together with the funds, leaving us holding the bag. My guitar lay in a closet for a number of years. I couldn't even give it away.