There is a Tavern in the Town

There are a number of older Americana tunes in many fake books that I think make good piano lesson material. This tune, There is a Tavern in the town, is a favorite sing along from decades gone by. I think it can still be used in today's piano environments at clubs, restaurants, cruise ships and rock and roll duelling piano bars as well as at home. It's a great goodbye song. The narrator on this Four Aces version is annoying but the recording is vintage and original. 3 minutes. [+]

When you take lessons from me, you'll be assigned this blog entry to listen to to get yourself acclimatized for the process of "learning to play it" and quite possibly learning to sing along too. I encourage all piano students to sing many songs they play and eventually to write sings, sing and play them and a "singer songwriter"-- the higher form of the musical arts, in my opinion. You only have to go back to J.S. Bach to witness the father of singer/songwriter skills. Anyway, here's my attempt to do "Tavern".

I'm not sure why the perspective or frame is smaller than it should be. It's a glitch I don't understand yet but will correct in coming videos. Recording and uploading is an entire piano lesson series by itself as is the entire technical art of amps, mixing, keyboards and rhythm.



Just to provide some amusing contrast, take a look at one the artists I encountered in the 1970's-- Rick Wakeman, a keyboardist-- likely classically trained on the piano-- who was one of the first rock musicians to make full use of the newly invented "synthesizer" keyboards. Here's "Arthur". Wakeman himself didn't sing but his band members did.+]

Here's a piano hobbyist who was able to memorize the piano "cover" version. [+] There are a lot of youtubers who are able to do great covers like this but who lack the vocals.