Whan you're a song writer, you are often asked about your influences. In this months letter, I'm going to discuss mine.
I'd have to start with my parents. we always had a piano or an organ in the house.My mother played from a book. We had piles of them inside the piano bench. My dad was more improvisational. I remember him feeling around for the right chord for something he was trying to play. They both sang in the choir at church. (Lutheran) There was a children's choir as well, and I sang in that.
So my first connection to music was in church.One of my earliest memories (I must have been 3 or 4) is being in church on somebody's lap and hearing them sing “hosanna” in part of the liturgy. I started singing along, thinking they were singing “Oh Susanna”
In the fifties, Hi-Fi started to be a big deal, and my dad was into it. There was always a record player or a radio playing. My mom liked musicals. One of the first movies I saw in a theater was South Pacific. I still remember some of those tunes.
I had an older cousin that I would have spend-overs with and he turned me on to rock and roll. That was very exciting. Transistor radios came out around that time, and I started listening to what I liked.
More importantly,he turned me on to what was called soul music. There were four stations (AM) that we listened to back then. KYA and KEWB were the Top 40 stations, and KDIA and KSOL were the soul music stations. I always gravitated toward the soul stations.
I remember the first time my cousin played one of those stations for me. It was a Sunday night and there was a church service on. It was jumpin'. I thought “This is way better that our church”. I think that was the first time I heard music that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Prior to that I had been exposed to classical music, show tunes from musicals, and a certain amount of big band type stuff from my parents listening habits at home.
As I got into my. teens, my own tastes began to broaden. I had a friend next door who had an older friend of the family move in with them. This guy had a large collection of records, and he would play them for us, and let us play them. He was into blues and folk music, both of which were starting to become popular. I remember hearing Little Richard, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Joan Baez, Judy Henske, Richard and Mimi Farina, Bob Dylan, and many others.
It was around this time that FM radio started to respond to these awakening musical tastes, as well as an explosion of rock bands that were influenced by these things, and breaking away from a lot of the bubble gum kind of Top 40 stuff and creating music that , to me was more exciting.
All of these things I would call influences. But I never thought of creating music myself until I heard Bob Dylan. When I heard “The Lonely Death of Hattie Carrol” I realized the power a song can have. “You who philosophize disgrace And criticize all fear Take the rag away from your face Now ain't the time for your tears .” I knew that music could be exciting, but when I heard Dylan, I thought about writing myself.
To sum this all up, I would say that I have been influenced by all these kinds of music, as well as others that have not been mentioned like Country and Western and Jazz that I have enjoyed. But the music that has influenced me the most is probably Rock, Blues, RnB, Folk, and Bob Dylan. (not necessarily in that order)
But I see other influences popping in my songs up all the time. An example of that is a song I've recently started covering called Baltimore Oriole. I heard it sung by Judy Henske in the 60's. The song has stayed in the back of my mind all these years and one day I was listening to it in my head and I thought I would learn to play it. I went to Judy's version, and found that it was written by Hoagie Carmichael (music) and Paul Webster (lyrics) in the 1940's. From there I went on to a version that George Harrison did on a solo record in the 80's and stole his arrangement.
The upshot of all this is that musical influences for me are deep and wide and I never know how a song is going to sound until it starts, of its own accord, to become itself.
Thanks for reading.
Richard