A Little About Our History

Happy and I started Homespun in 1967. For more than five decades now we have been producing lessons by world-class musician/instructors who pass on their expertise and experience through our successful teaching methods. Homespun’s students are in every state of the U.S. and in over 40 countries around the world, with untold numbers of satisfied customers learning to play a wide variety of instruments and styles. How did all this come about?

Happy had been teaching guitar since his college days and wrote his first instruction books in the mid- 1960s. Shortly after Fingerpicking Styles for Guitar was published in 1966, he started getting letters from players who just couldn’t quite get the right sound by reading the notes off the printed page. At the same time, Happy was going on tour more often, leaving many guitar students without lessons for weeks at a time. The perfect solution for both situations was to tape a series of lessons, based both on his books and on his teaching method he had developed over the years. (Subsequent books included Bluegrass Guitar, Flatpick Country Guitar, The Blues Bag, The Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee, and others.)

Our first instructional tapes were recorded in our living room on a home reel-to-reel tape recorder. Once they were on tape, it seemed like a natural idea to offer them to a wider audience, so we placed classified ads in a few small magazines. Both Guitar Player and Rolling Stone had started publication that year, and Happy was, at the time, the editor of Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine, so that’s where we advertised our products. The response took us by surprise. Not only were people ordering the lessons, but they started to request instruction in other styles, and then in other instruments. To accommodate them, we enlisted the help of some musician friends to teach other courses. Before we knew it, we had a small but growing catalog of taped music instruction.

“Homespun” was an appropriate name. After dinner, Happy and I would clear the table, hook up a daisy chain of reel-to-reel recorders, and start making copies. It must have been a comical sight to see us then. We’d start the master player, then race down the line to get each recording machine going. At the end of the side, we’d turn each machine off, flip the tapes over, then start the process again. The next day, after the kids caught the school bus, I would wrap up the tapes we recorded the night before and take them to the Woodstock post office. A couple of years later, audio cassettes became popular, so we duplicated both reel-to-reel and cassette lessons. Eventually, we made a big purchase of a high-speed duplicator that did both, and we were really in business.

In the early 1980s, video revolutionized the learning process, because you could see as well as hear what the instructor was imparting – quite a revelation for that time. We were the first to develop close-ups and split-screen images using professional three-camera systems, good studios, and top camera operators to provide the clearest possible angles and sound.

By the early 2000s the media changed again; we transferred everything to DVDs and CDs. The digital revolution is more or less complete – for now, anyway – and all our lessons are available via download and streaming, with all of the conveniences and flexibility this technology entails. Our lessons can be viewed on computers, phones, and tablets anywhere in the world. There are over 800 titles in our catalog, and most of our earliest audio cassette lessons are still available online.

Throughout all these changes, the instruction is the most important part of the end product; we make sure each one does the job. Over the years, we have received many awards and excellent reviews in Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, Playboy, and in newspapers around the country. In addition, we’ve had feature stories on NBC’s Today, CNN’s Entertainment Tonight and the Discovery Channel’s Monitor World News, as well as in all the leading music trade publications.

When I look back on all that has happened, and the technological innovations that have affected the way we all access information of every kind, I am struck by how little the music itself has changed. We’ve come a long way from the kitchen table to the internet, but our basic love of the music is still at the heart of our work.

Musically yours,

Jane Traum

President

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