BILLY Connolly - who else? - tells this 1960s story with aplomb.
He was in his teens when he was blown away by the American singer Pete Seeger and his banjo-playing at a concert in Glasgow. Thus inspired, he bought an old banjo from the Barras, for £2.50.
On making enquiries as to where he could take banjo lessons, he was pointed in the direction of the Glasgow Folk Centre, in Montrose Street.
He arrived there with his banjo to find the lessons in full swing. But he saw something else that took him aback.
"The man who ran the centre ... was holding a guy out of the window, three storeys up", he later recalled, "and yelling at him, '------- give it me now!'
"I had no idea what the fellow had done to deserve that".
The Folk Centre was famous in those days. Everyone who was anyone went there. A young musician, Iain McGeachy, later known as John Martyn, played there. He saw Connolly in the club, and Alex Harvey too, and recalled being charged ten shillings by the owner to sing three songs.
Billy Kelly, who would become a well-known music promoter, was an accomplished pianist in his youth, and played the Folk Centre with his friend Des Farrell, who later became national secretary of the clothing and textiles section of the GMB union.
The Irish singer Christy Moore's first Scottish gig was at the Montrose Street venue in 1967, opening for Hamish Imlach.
Rab Noakes, who died last November, remembered playing the centre. "It was a rickety old warehouse building and you went up some shoogly stairs to get to it", he told the Glasgow Music City Tours website in 2017. "It was a great place to be around at the time because Billy Connolly and the Humblebums were around, Iain McGeachy who became John Martyn, and the older guys like Hamish Imlach who we learned a lot from".
Debt we owe to the folk revival of the sixties
Like other towns and cities across Britain, Glasgow and Edinburgh were experiencing a folk revival boom in the Sixties.
The Edinburgh University Folk Song Society had been established by folklorist Hamish Henderson and Stuart MacGregor in 1958, records author JP Bean in his oral history of the folk scene, Singing From the Floor.
Norman Buchan and Morris Blythman, teachers at Rutherglen Academy, set up a lunchtime folk club for pupils there, which led in 1960 to the formation of the Glasgow Folk Song Club (Norman and his wife Janey would champion folk music for many years).
In Edinburgh in 1959, Bean continues, the Gaelic singer Dolina MacLennan started a singing night at Edinburgh's Waverley Bar, a haven for folk musicians for decades to come. In 1960, Roy Guest, later an agent for many folk acts, opened the Howff in a modest upstairs room off the Royal Mile.
Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor were Scotland’s first folk stars, and their four-year, five-nights-a-week stint on the BBC television show, Tonight, helped spread the folk-music message nationwide.
At its peak the folk scene was alive with such names as guitarists Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy, the colourful Glaswegian singer Alex Campbell, Archie Fisher, Hamish Imlach, Norma Waterson, Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl, Josh MacRae, and many others.
In 1964 the Glasgow Herald spoke to a young female folk duo - Zoe Boyd and Irene Masia. Zoe, 22, from Cambuslang, and Irene, 20, from King's Park, were billed as Irene and Zoe, and had sung at folk-song clubs across Scotland.
Obituary: Alex Beaton, Glaswegian folk-singer who found fame in America
"With pop music the themes are very hackneyed", said Irene. "The songs are nearly always about teenage love problems.
"With 'folk' the range is as wide as life itself. There are love ballads, of course, but because they are written by some ordinary person wanting to express his feelings they're more perceptive and real than anything out of Tin Pan Alley".
One of the best-known, if shortest-lived folk clubs of the time was Clive's Incredible Folk Club, in Sauchiehall Street, put together in 1966 by Clive Palmer, who was a founding member of the Incredible String Band.
"It was the first all-night folk club", Palmer said in a video interview in 2010. "It only lasted six months - the police closed it down because it was open all night. You can imagine what Glasgow's like on a Saturday night - pretty wild".
Author Rob Young says in his book, Electric Eden, that the club "attracted a host of folkies, freaks and local gangsters".
In his book, the American producer Joe Boyd recounts how he tracked down Palmer and Robin Williamson, also of the Incredible String Band, to the venue.
It's quite incredible to string it together again after all those years
"In early March '66 I dodged the drunks and the pools of puke that were prominent features of Sauchiehall Street nights, arriving at the venue only to find the door locked and a crowd outside arguing with a policeman". Hamish Imlach told him that the place had been shut down as a fire hazard.
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