Blog #6

Come Together
Jack Marschke
Imagine a time when there were no ipods, cd players, or even cassette tapes, and the only way to hear music was watching a band live, listening to it on the radio or buying a record. From out of this time sprang some of the greatest musicians of all time. Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and many more.

It started out with the blues; artists like Muddy Waters and B.B. King started out playing blues songs that they had heard then wrote their own songs and developed their own unique style of blues. From there, artists such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry started to play blues music too, but they would add a faster beat that you could get up and dance to. This was the start of rock and roll. For kids like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had grown up listening to bubble gum pop music, this was a new and exciting form of expression. They were inspired to learn to play guitar and then start a band. You can see, in some of their songs, some styles of their musical influences. For example in songs like “Twist and Shout”, they used a singing style like Little Richard. In songs like “Get Back” “Kansas City”, “I’m Down”, and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” they use a classic 12 bar blues for the guitar. One specific artist that inspired them was Chuck Berry because of his blues-ish rock and roll sound. Chuck Berry was inspired to play music by the blues artist T-Bone Walker just as he inspired The Beatles.

My friend Travis Buck first introduced me to The Beatles in 5th grade when he brought in a Beatles cd for an assignment in music class. He was a great guitar player and seemed like he had really good taste in music so I trusted his opinion. I didn’t listen to a lot of music back then, but this changed my mind and I started listening to The Bealtes all the time which lead me to start listening to other bands like Led Zepplin, Cream, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and a few other rock bands. Then I began to learn to play guitar and lucky for me my guitar teacher’s favorite band was The Beatles which meant that he knew a lot about them and he began to teach me how to play Beatles songs and he showed me where The Beatles got some of their guitar ideas from. He taught me about the blues, and how it is pretty much the roots of rock and roll. He also showed me how George Harrison used soloing similar to Chuck Berry. Now I write my own songs taking elements from songs by The Beatles, blues music and many other styles as to keep rock music going. I even use the soloing style that Chuck Berry used. I’m not really a fan of the direction most popular music is going nowadays so I do my best to play Beatles music as to inspire other people to continue the tradition of rock and roll music.