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The Music Home Page.

By Paul A. L. Hall.

Go to music directory 01

There in the directory, you'll be able to check out the text of the songs.

Click on any of the following to get to it's section on this page.

Torrential Time, The Shocked Confidents, Northwest Passage, Window Mind Frost Design, Star Stream Ride, How Do You Start With Nothing?, Run City Man, Locked Razor, Rugged Comprehension, In the Humor of a Bard, In the Valley Below, Insomniac Beacon, Jones Screamed, The Flat Land is Man's Land, Green Hills of Dawn, The Painless Way, The Rich Man and the Poor Man, They Would Happy Be the Ones, The Time Bends in the Distance, All of the Obvious, Blessed are the Dead, Nightingale, The War of the Worlds, A Tapestry of Then and Now, Forever Will Not Wait, The Book of Earth, The Exuberant, Words Are Not For Chatter,
Canyon City Path 1-2388, Dyea 051505-37, Port of Skagway 1-2211, White Pass 1268, A Sea Song in 4 Parts.

Articles about music.

For a while, oh, about twelve years or so, from about 1978 to 1990, I was a street singer. They called us buskers, a term that seemed to be coined in the nineteenth century when London theatres used to give examples of their shows on the streets. I think the term is derived from the Spanish language.

I called myself the husky busker, and either I sang on the street with my guitar case open, in underground corridors such as subway tunnels with the guitar case open, in cafés or night clubs and then take up a collection, or even in subway cars on the move (in Paris, Marseilles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. -- I had learned to stand without hanging on from commuting to my old taxi driving job. It gave me something interesting to do while riding the screaming double-E subway from the Battery to Queens in NYC back in my taxi driving days in the early seventies. Little did I imagine I was really training for a career that would later finance two trips around the world!).

Kind folks would toss in some spare change or even some paper money from time to time. Sometimes, a flower or something else like a token, once someone threw in a friendship ring and once an opal miner from Lightning Ridge a few stops north of where I was busking in Hornsby, on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, threw in a low quality opal worth about twenty bucks.

My best day ever was on the streets of Sydney in a day-long rain storm. I sang under a piece of clear plastic in the rain and completely covered the guitar case in plastic. It filled up with water and became a wishing well and everyone passing by became a well-wisher and soon the case was more filled with money than water. Then the TV. station came by and I was on the evening news all around Australia. Oh well. It's as I say: "Water you talking about."

Well, it turned out music was more profitable for me than art, so during that period I composed more than I drew. I didn't paint, except for a backdrop for a missionary in Bandung, Indonesia, who let me stay at his place for a few months before kicking me out. Mostly during those years I did drawings. I once memorized a drawing of a rose and found I could attract a crowd just doing that rose drawing right out of nowhere. All of the artwork during that period of time was mostly lost, or usually, I had to just leave it behind, or it got stolen, like the three paintings I did in Fiji that got stolen in Indonesia.

One thing I learned, if you were going to travel like I did, twice around the world and back and forth to lots of places, to over fifteen countries, you couldn't be that much of a materialist. I usually traveled with a couple of suitcases, my carry-on bag and my guitar. And I put my creative energy into writing poetry and putting it to music. Most of the time, however, had to be spent singing, which wasn't half bad. At least I was self-employed.

I sang in Paris and Marseille in France, in the streets of Spain, In Block M in Jakarta, Indonesia, In Lucky Eddie's in Suva, Fiji, In Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, In Auckland, New Zealand, and in Philadelphia and New York City in the USA.

So now I'm still trying to busk, but this time on line. Click one of the PayPal links and you can contribute by using their secure payment and donation site, kind of like in the old days when we used to toss something into the musician's open guitar case as we walked by on the street. I always did whenever I could. I thought of it as union dues.