Well I was, I started playing in high school actually. But before that I was a guitar player and played the special tuning, they don't use it today, it's a four string instrument with a tenor banjo tuning and then the strings were inverted so that the bottom string was up an octave and the top string was down an octave, which made it more like a ukulele in other words, close tuning. And I studied with George VanEpps at that time, who is, he was playing that particular instrument and starting on the regular six string guitar at that time. So we played duets. That's a long story. I wasn't even thinking of bass at that time, although my two favorite bass players were Pops Foster, played with Louis Russell's band, and Artie Bernstein, who I happened to hear along about that time. He had just switched from cello and he tuned his bass in fifths, which I had never heard of that before. I was just learning how to. In high school I just picked up the bass, of course tuned in fourths, as it still is. But in fifths means it's like the cello, C-G-D-A, and the same as tenor banjo tuning too, which only would be up an octave with the banjo of course. But Artie Bernstein got such a marvelous sound out of his instrument, and being a beginner on the bass, I was very impressed with that. And of course I would go into Roseland and hear Pops Foster playing with Louie Russell's band and he was like the star of the band. He got a great big sound on that bass. And that's what I wanted to try to emulate, either one or both of those guys. In those days bass was sort of part of the rhythm section and you never heard from them hardly any solos. The only who was playing solos in those days was Milt Hinton with Cab Calloway's band, and Milt, he was the first really well known bassist, outside of perhaps Red Brown, who played with the Goldkette band, Steve Brown, called Steve "Red" Brown. He joined after Gene Goldkette, he went with Paul Whiteman. And that was the first recording where you could really hear the bass. Up to that time there were mostly tubas. Bass players hadn't started switching over from tuba to string bass. I'm talking about 1928, 1929.