If there are any Official Secrets to Music, these are they:
1. Tell a Story — this simply means any story about the simple nursery song that you’ve selected for this exercise (such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, or “Jack & Jill” or “Sing a Song of Sixpence” — any story will do, including that there isn’t one, ie; a rambling exploration of random notes and measures. Usually it means a story, pure & simple, describing the song’s major points, such as the fact that the farmer lived in a dell, had a wife, many chicks, ducks, geese, horses, cattle, swine, and a couple of wild and crazy dogs with a penchant for handouts. A story like that generally begins with a beginning, goes on a while in the middle, and stops at the end. The MIDDLE part is generally about the obstruction, the pain, the misery or the angst of it all. A typical song story is “my baby done left me”, whether you hear it in blues, folk, pop, ballad, country-western, jazz or classical, it’s always about relationships of one kind or another. That’d be human/human (read as: “human over human”) and bottle/human and a whole chain of seductions that read more or less the same. The story is told verbally before the instrument is sounded. The STORY should NOT take more than 1 minute to tell, especially the “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Drownded, Boy Gets Hanged sort of murder-ballad you’ll find commonly in folk music.
Blues are in most cases easier stories to tell, as in:
The thrill has gone. The thrill has gone away. The thrill has gone. The thrill has gone away, etc. As you’ll note, it doesn’t have to rhyme very well to pass muster in pop music.
The fact that anyone on the Relationship-Go-Round should be unaware of the temporary nature of human relationships in the face of endless hungers, attractions and seductions is a wonder to me, yet there are literally millions of songs wailing over lost loves and misplaced affections. You don’t have to go much further (farther?) than that to find subject matter for song, but there are many other subjects…I can’t think of any, but I’m sure there are a few. Lessee, there are the Five Fingers of Fate — Sex, Money, Drugs, Power & Diet.
These are the five major food groups of human endeavor, driven by the wonderful machines of living tissue, toward survival and away from danger, using the powerful driving forces of attraction and repulsion, toward pleasure while recoiling from pain. Most people live like that, and if you examine the result, it looks pretty much the same as the life of an amoeba, carrying water and depositing waste as food along the chain. Gosh, I never realized how exciting human life was, until I saw daytime TV and game shows.
2. Sing a Song — it isn’t as hard as you think it is. Pick up one of my special handmade hardwood “Bardo Buzzer” Kazoos, and hum “Pop Goes the Weasel” into it, or any other song from childhood that you happen to remember, if any. “What do I do if I can’t remember any childhood songs?” you might think to answer. Ummmm, okay, how about a Beatles song, or a commercial jingle, or “Happy Birthday” or “The Alphabet Song”??? Any of those would do, as long as you know the song well.
3. Apply Gorby’s 3 Great Laws of Blues: “Don’t be afraid to miss”, “Make it look better than it sounds”, and “Don’t fill every measure up with notes”.
For elaboration on the 3 Great Laws, see the DVD videos or look on youtube for postings of parts of said DVDs.
HOW TO USE THESE SECRETS at your present Level of Skill (or Lack of it):
Play Gorby’s Buzz-Contact Backing Track Beginner-1 (available from IDHHB.com and hum the same song as before, but this time try to fit it into the backing track, by bringing it “in-tune” with the backing track. If you can’t get your humming song to be in the same key as the backing track, it’s okay, don’t worry about it now. You might find another song that fits better, and that would be fine, too, just as long as you don’t have to think about the words to the song.
You might want to make a video of yourself jamming with the kazoo to the backing track, and make yourself watch it and listen to it critically. Of course it will be wretched the first time you try, but wasn’t that also true of other things? Need I remind you of your wedding night? Now try the same thing (not the Wedding Night, the backing track solo…) with a blues harp, if you happen to have one and are on the Blues Harp Course.