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Home::Music
Busking For Dollars At The Corner
Author : Dennis Walsh
There's something to be said about small beginnings. Doing
something small for a small audience is a good place to start.
But, starting anything new is always difficult. Performers need
to test the water, to break the ice. We all need to get
experience somehow but not at the risk of making ourselves look
bad or worse, disappointing your audience. Audiences will only
be as forgiving as their level of expectation. The secret is
never to promise too much.
After learning to finger pick my first guitar chord, I wrote a
gritty, poetic one chord song and performed it on stage for a
small crowd at a downtown Toronto coffee house. Roberta
Richards, a Canadian music impressario who became a cult legend
mentoring folk artists like Dan Hill and Leon Redbone, was there
that night. Wonderfully talented musician play in bands
practicing for months in their basement without ever taking a
single booking. I broke every rule in the book by performing
that night but somehow Roberta was impressed..
It's hard to know when you're ready. There is, after all, an
audience for everything and everyone. Beauty is in the eye of
the beholder. Getting an audience isn't hard; any circus
sideshow can do that. You don't have to be perfect to be heard
and to be liked. One of the best kept secrets in the music
industry is if you do what you do well audiences will always
take you at face value. They don't know how much you know or
don't know, what you can or cannot play. As long as you do
whatever you do well - no matter how little that may be - an
audience will respond to what they hear. If they find you
interesting and they like what they hear, they'll stick around.
If they don't like what they hear, they'll leave. It's as simple
as that.
The critics hated Bob Dylan. He sang two and three chord songs
that sounded like gibberish. They didn't understand stream of
conscious writing and the "sound" that would make him famous.
But, there's no accounting for taste. Audiences didn't try to
analyze Dylan's songs. They related to what he had to say. What
drew them most of all was the impregnable aura of mystery that
surrounded him.
Inspired by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie, Dylan started
performing folk songs at coffeehouses in New York's Greenwich
Village. Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg said he, "wept hearing 'Hard
Rain's A-Gonna Fall'". Bob Dylan wrote the Beat poetry of a new
generation. His stream of consciousness imagery was the most
exciting, subversive thing in the air. Dylan became folk music's
Elvis. The folk scene embraced him.
It wasn't long before Columbia Records A&R man John Hammond
signed him in 1961. Peter, Paul & Mary made his song "Blowin' in
the Wind" a huge pop hit in 1963. And by the time "The Times
They Are A-Changin'" was released in early 1964, Dylan's song
writing was clearly influenced by rythm and blues inspired by
the British Invasion and his new friends the Beatles. With
artistic achievement that stretch over 30 years, Dylan refuses
to categorize his music as being the voice of anything although
those of us who lived in that era had our eyes and ears open.
You may not be Bob Dylan but write a few songs anyway. Play a
folk guitar if you have to. The more you learn, the better you
get, the larger your audience and following will become.
Eventually, you'll get good enough to be paid even if it's
busking for dollars at the corner.
Dennis Walsh progressofmusic@hotmail.com
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