While watching the interview with Billy Sheehan I noticed that he and Steve got onto the subject of musicology. The importance of musicology for a musician is pretty much like history for a president, you have to dig a little deeper to find out why some people play the way they do. The best example that comes to mind is if you really like Eric Clapton and want to learn some of his style you have 2 choices. 1. Listen to Eric Clapton and copy what he does. 2. You can listen to who he listened to when forming his style. If you choose 2, the you will find yourself listening to guys like Freddy King and Big Bill Broonsey (not sure of spelling at this hour).
Start with Freddy King. Freddy King is from Texas. He grew up listening to T-Bone Walker (not related to the Texas Ranger guy on tv). Freddy's first album was a collection of instrumentals in the early 60s. If you listen to that album and listen to a lot of Cream you will notice that one of Eric Clapton's guitar solo's was exactly from one of Freddy's instrumentals.
On to Big Bill Broonsey. This was a very important figure in American music history because in 1939 he broke down multple barriers by when he played at Carnegie Hall. I will leave a little for you to dig up on your own there about who he is and such.
The next part of the subject that you might encounter when trying to listen to old stuff like Big Bill is how do you get your mindset adjusted for the music to make sense. Music is no different than literature in that in order to understand stuff from a different time you have to understand a few more things about that time and the location.
Things to find out about the time:
- What was going on politically?
- What was the economy like?
- What kind of clothes did people wear?
- How did they travel?
- Where did they play?
Once you are able to make some mental connections to how these questions apply to the person you are listening to it makes listening and understanding the style a lot easier. This is also very helpful in helping to incorporate something into your style based on historical significance. Example being if you are writing a song about a war, check out other songs about different wars to give yourself a chance to show history repeats itself.
Another musician that requires a little history to really understand is Bob Wills. He and the Texas Playboys took the job very serious. They provided a community service during the depression and Bob was very intense about making sure the band stayed on focus. Eldon Shamblin was a guitar player for many year and he was quoted in one of the guitar magazines saying "If you should up 3 nights in a row playing sad notes you would get fired. Time were hard and people were miserable, the last thing they needed to hear was someone letting their own hard times some throught their instrument."
Most of what can be learned while studying musicology can be directly applied to your current efforts in some way or another. If not you can always become like myself, a clearing house for useless information. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that I think about when I can't sleep at night.