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Scott,
That attitude may be typical but not always the rule. It all depends on geography and Venue.I admittedly have a difficult time with that were I live because a lot of people are self proclaimed music experts & critics.Then there are the people that just want to have fun. I auditioned for the Local C of C here for there dinner and they LOVE what I play. They LOVE the songs and me. They don't care how it's done. My friend plays the VFWs,Legions etc and makes more then the Bands. Why? Because he plays the SONGS THEY want to here not the ones the band wants to play.



John, I think you have a real point. There was a time when the songs were the feature and who performed them was secondary. I actually watched a documentary about when this started to change over to the singer/songwriter being featured over the song performed by some popular group or singer.

Watching Lawrence Welk is a great lesson with any of the featured instrumentalists on this topic, or any of the great past instrumentalists (thinking of Floyd Cramer, Roy Clarke, etc. ) or singers who took already existing known and popular songs and made a career out of performing them. I honestly can't think of any off the top of my head because this has never really been of any interest to me. Plinking grace notes like Floyd, or pickin and grinnin like Roy was interesting to me.

If I recall correctly, the documentary blamed people like Bob Dylan for starting the trend away from performers performing other people's music, and toward performers/bands performing their own music or at least music selected by them to be 'original' music. Thus also supposedly began the slow death of sheet music publication.

The Floyd Cramer types no longer exist and haven't for decades, at least in youth-popular culture. Born in 1967, I grew up in the era when that was nearly gone. My paradigm is the expectation that a 'band' is live, and should perform music that they themselves have written/composed. The current dance 'DJ' culture is also somewhat confusing and of limited interest to me as well. I'm talking people that are not spinning records at high school dances, but folks that have become superstars being 'DJ's (when no discs are usually involved), but remixing and selecting songs in a sequence and overlaying of other songs gets someone famous. It's weird to me.

-Scott

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