The Audition & The Letter

The afternoon light cut through the high windows of the NTSU music school office, casting long shadows across the linoleum floor and floating dust in-gusted by blustering autumn air. Sitting across a small laminate desk from me was a man I'd never seen before. I had no idea who he was, what he had accomplished, or where he had come from. To me, he wasn't a legend—he was just a quiet university staffer tasked with screening applicants, notepad in hand, sitting next to a pencil and a portable cassette recorder. He introduced himself and I to him in polite exchange. He felt affable by first impression and that helped me relax some.

Looking back, there was a certain wild brashness to it all—a young common laborer emerging from the red dirt ranch and farmlands of southwestern Oklahoma, possessing sheer nerve enough to think he could actually become a professional musician. I carried an unshakeable belief that despite my lack of formal training, I already possessed something deeply innate and worth listening to, an undeniable creative core that I was bound to exhibit in that audition, no matter who happened to be sitting on the other side of the desk.

I settled into the wooden chair, adjusted my blue-tinted wire-rims, and confidently set my fingers on the steel strings of a modest factory-made guitar which had recently replaced the Gibson 12-string destroyed in a garage apartment fire. The moment I started into the first of my two original pieces—tunes forged back on those red dirt roads and wind-swept plains—the room completely dissolved.

My eyes drifted shut and may have even rolled back a bit after lids closed completely, then I slipped right into that familiar, deep state of trance I've always craved. Consciousness receded, time stopped, and my physical awareness faded until there was nothing left except the cadence and resonance coming off the soundboard, and the comforting sensation of strings fretted and plucked just so. I wasn't consciously thinking about technique, scale shapes, base lines or formal mechanics; I was just channeling an innate drive to generate and ride sonic waveforms no one had ever heard before. All of those aspects were presented by matter of circumstance, as honestly as the deep state of my trance.

When the final chord brush drifted off and died away into the quiet room, I snapped back to reality with a slight flinch I hoped wasn't obvious, looked down at the top of my instrument and caught my breath, relieved to realize I hadn't lost composure so completely as to drool on the top of my guitar, which I sometimes did when I went that far under.

The man behind the desk simply looked up from his notepad, his expression completely calm and unreadable, but still friendly and approchable. I wondered what he had written down.

"Very nice," he said softly.

That was it.

Walking out into the too-bright and sunlight warming the NTSU campus, I was convinced I had blown it. I was sure my simple, heart-led original tunes hadn't measured up to whatever rigid academic standard the university was looking for. Pretty college girls walking close by and smiling as they passed then caught my attention and I thought about the girlfriend I had dated in the dusty, red-dirted Oklahoma farm and ranch town for years, and how I was making a grand push toward professional musicality for her as much as for my own satisfaction. Alway a dreamer and rarely ashamed of it.

It was less than a week later, when an official letter arrived in the mailbox that I realized those two quiet words uttered by the man across the desk were a stamp of approval rather than a polite dismissal. And it was only much later that I learned the quiet stranger behind the desk was Jack Leroy Petersen—and that my raw, southwestern Oklahoma audacity had just passed muster with one of the absolute pioneers of modern performance guitar education.

Today I learned that Mr. Petersen died less than nine months ago at the age of nintey-two and that he had been born less than fifteen miles from the rural Oklahoma town I had fled at age twenty-two to begin seeking fame through sonics and lyrics combined for audibly painting imagery of true-life stories, both humorous and poignant. Little did I know that another life-changing letter would arrive not long after that coveted NTSU acceptance letter.