Welcome back, Deckman! It's good to see you posting again. It is indeed interesting to see the crazy variety of influences/music people listened to. While it's hard to know how much we've been influenced by the music we grew up listening to, as a songwriter I find it humorous when I realize I've lifted part of the melody of a song out of the "tradition." I generally write out of my love for traditional folk music... three chord songs mostly. But, every once in a while I'll realize that I've unknowingly drawn a melody from somewhere unlikely. I wrote a song about a bar in southern Wisconsin and realized later that the melody in one section was suspiciously like Oh, What A Beautiful Morning. Another song has a very Irish melody to it... might even have copied a traditional melody, although I don't think so because no one has ever been able to identify it. But, it sure sounds Irish to me. It's just what came out. And then there's a song I wrote that someone referred to, saying, play that Beatle's-sounding song. In each case, I didn't consciously "use" a melody or a sound. As the old commercial for spaghetti sauce used to say, "It's all in there."

As a songwriter, I look at all the music I love as part of my vocabulary. Each of us has our own vocabulary that is made up of everything we've listened to and loved. Probably a little bit of stuff in there we didn't even like, I bet. That's true for every musician, songwriter or not.

Sal Salvador, a wonderful jazz guitarist who I came to know a few years ago gave me a memorable quote. I was talking to him about another Jazz guitar hero of mine, Tal Farlow. I noticed that after a span of tweny years without recording, when Tal began recording again, one of his improvisations on a song was almost note for note the same as a different song he'd recorded twenty years earlier. Sal said:

"A musician's style is the summation of his limitations."

For him to talk about Tal (one of his closest friends) in terms of limitations, when it didn't seem like Tal HAD any, was eye-opening for me.

Jerry