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That's because it's evil. 

The A-shaped barre chord.

Good luck with that DE.  I'd love to see you.  I'm taking the family on a trip in July and am unlikely to run the August trip to Diane's this year.  I ought to let her know, but I haven't made up my mind for sure yet.  I'm leaning that way.  Depends on work.  I'm not going to be retired unless the Virginia Lottery finally recognizes the merits of letting me win. 

- Zurf

If you're playing Mississippi John Hurt or John Lee Hooker or other musicians like them, don't even consider putting them to standard timing.  It won't work.  No one ever told them that was the "right" way to play, so they just did what sounded good to them or let them say what they wanted to have said.  Which brings us back to Topdown's axiom. 

- Zurf

You can do it naoslager.  Singing isn't natural for many.  It's OK to take voice lessons too.  If you can bang out a steady beat and change chords, you play well enough to sing along.  But do it at your own pace.  Nobody's rushing you. 

I've had many, many lessons on lots of different instruments, but I'm self-taught on guitar.  I took a few lessons to try to get back into reading music but I let it fade away again.  I am likely to take some lessons to help me get over the scales / arpeggios / inversions hurdle so that I can play some recognizable licks.  Funny that I can kind of do it with confidence on the bass, but using the same strings an octave higher gives me the fits. 

- Zurf

I use SmugMug for my photos.  My company uses Mozy for backups.

There are a few things going on in a song, and with guitar you can participate in any or all of them.  However, just starting out I think you'd do well to limit yourself to beat and melody. 

The beat is the underlying structure of the song.  All they rhythm takes place over the beat.  Most rock songs have four beats that repeat over and over.  1 2 3 4.  There may be a lot of rhythmic things happening in those four beats, but overall it's four beats.  See if you can listen to something and get the underlying beat of the song.  Just listening.  When you can clap your hands or tap your feet constantly at the same speed without alteration and keep it going, you understand beat.  Strum down once per beat.  Sometimes you change chord on the 1 beat and sometimes on the three beat and sometimes on each beat.  You have to listen for that.  But first... listen for the beat.  Often times Country songs - especially the genre now being called Alternate Country or Americana - is easiest to hear the beat. 

Then the melody is what you may think of when you sing it.  It rises and falls and is the recognizable tune that you would hum if someone said, "I don't know that song.  Can you hum a little bit of it?" 

If you can sing the melody while strumming down once per beat in time steadily over the song, you've met a significant hurdle for playing and singing.  You'll neat rhythmic stuff with the strumming and learn to pick out a melody and enhance it over time.  I've seen some guys in bars playing where they keep the beat with a bass line, play rhythm in the middle, and play melody as a lead lick all at the same time on guitar.  It's extremely impressive, but that takes years of steady practice to get to that level.  As a beginning, playing a steady, smooth strum without having to stop to change chords and being able to sing the melody at the same time is HUGE.  As arkady said, it takes a great deal of practice.  It also is not something you learn all at the same time.  You have to learn the chords, smooth transition between chords, how music is constructed in beats and rhythm, how melody works, and in all likelihood you'll have to learn to sing too.  You've got a lifetime of learning ahead of you, and no matter how much you learn and how good you get, there will still be more to learn.  It's wonderful. 

- Zurf

How are you doing today, bud?  I'm a little worried about you.  If you need to talk, hopefully you kept my cell phone number from the river jam.  If not, I'll send it private message on your Facebook.

- Zurf

This Christmas

It's a very special Christmas. 

Blah, blah, blah

The lyrics make no sense.  The sentiments are artificial.  The lesson of the song has nothing to do with Christmas but to add pressure to the holiday.  Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.  Yuck.

Well it is a jumbo. 

- Zurf

Yep.  It's a '59.  The model is E251N and serial number is A-2480.  I found an Epiphone serial number decoder.  When I put that information in, it popped out that it's a blonde 1959 built at the Gibson plant in Kalamazoo, MI. 

The main questions now are whether the neck and pickups are original Epiphone (called "New York" components) or whether they are Gibson.  For that, I'll have to look at the guitar.  The Epiphone necks are a V-shape.  The pickups are single coils.  The Gibson necks are fat and the pickups are humbucking.  I don't know if that matters for value. 

That's as much as I've been able to learn today researching it. 

I'll check out the library tomorrow for that magazine. 

- Zurf

I saw one on E-Bay at $3950, but that doesn't mean much more than me typing it here does.