Who I've Always Been
I guess you have to call it an African custom practiced predominately in the southern parts of America. There, a name like "Robert Lee" easily looses it's "T". And that leaves you with "RobeLee" cause no one really pronounces the "R" anyway. When I was five, my parents gave me a plastic banjo as a present, and I found out I could play and sing some of the melodies I heard on the radio with that thing. By the time I broke all the strings on it, I was hooked on music. It's been a part of my life ever since. This is my opportunity to share my music, the musical part of my life, my life in melodies, harmonies and rhythms.
No matter what I did, how I developed, music was always present. It was when I became musically intimate with jazz and some of it's musicians that I transformed. The experinces I had and still have with jazz, gave the music inside of me more depth, more possibilities of expression. At the bottom, underneath all of this, was always a heavy bass, and the funky beat of the drums, the groove of percussion.
Drums, Drums from the Deep
As a child, I would hear rhythms in my head when I walked. A song who's beat matched my stride, would just pop into my head and I'd be walking, and singing it. I sang everything I liked, and I liked almost everything I heard. I still sing many of those tunes today.
I never really made an effort, but no matter what I got involved in, music was always at the center, at the heart of everything. Even as I walked the streets of Holywood, owning nothing but my "bike" and the guitar that hung around my neck, it was music that got me through. Everything I experienced is somehow woven into what I feel, which produces what I hear. Making that audible for you is my taks here. Let me be about it.
