In the summer of 1978 I went to a restaurant and bar called The Sanctuary in Iowa City to hear the folk singer Bob Gibson who was billed as “the living legend”. I knew nothing about Gibson except that there was a small photo ofhim in the newspaper and he was shown with a 12-string guitar.

I was 23 years old and fresh out of college and I’d come to Iowa to study poetry writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I was immoderately in love with the collected Folkways recordings of Leadbelly and I owned a third rate 12 string guitar that wouldn’t stay tuned and I spent far too much of my time trying to play “The Bourgeois Blues” and “The Midnight Special” without having any concept that Leadbelly used a different tuning.

I was lonely that summer. I’d rented a student apartment that came without furniture. The landlord loaned me a sofa with no legs and a bed. I sat in the empty living room and tuned my bad guitar and wondered how I would make it in the world with my evolving blindness and my obvious incapacity to do the customary jobs reserved for America’s misfits. Blind people don’t drive taxis or wait tables or serve as short order cooks. Anyway, I was too much in love with poetry to picture myself doing much of anything. I didn’t feel sorry for myself: I kept as much as possible inside poems and songs. I sang Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” in my barren apartment as the prairie dusk came with its graduated softness.

The Sanctuary was a skinny room with a bar on one wall and a small stage on the other side. The tables in the center had real church pews for seats. Although my vision was unreliable I estimated there were about 70 customers sitting in those pews and perhaps a dozen people at the bar. A good turn out in a small town. I asked the waitress if I could have a table by the stage since I was “legally blind” and she said this would be okay. I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and waited for the show.