Vignette 11

A man played his guitar outside of a small tavern in Texas for eight years before realizing that his tuning had been incorrect all along. The types of chords he used included half diminished 7ths, 13th chords, and augmented triads. He did not realize that the set of tunes he had learned should not have resounded so atonal. He was self-taught and had a keen ability for reading music, but he had no discerning ear. The reason that no one had corrected him after eight years was because the tavern had been deserted for thirty years and no one could hear him for miles around. One day, a truck stopped outside of the tavern and the driver asked the guitar player for directions to El Paso. The guitar player shrugged his shoulders and asked if the driver wanted to hear a song. When the driver heard the man's song, he got out of his truck and forcefully lifted the guitar out of the musician's hands. He tuned the guitar, and said, "You better learn to tune this thing." Then he got in his truck and peeled away leaving the guitar player in a cloud of dust.