Why is The Song Train not a book or video? Isn that how people usually learn music nowadays?
Good question. We think that playing by ear (watching and listening) is the natural way people have always learned, and we would have loved to make a video of us playing these songs. However, we would then have not been allowed to do copyrighted songs, since copyright law does not allow it. It’s kind of a loophole. We could not include original recordings of the Hank Williams or Bob Dylan songs, we could not print the words or show the notes in print, but we are allowed to record our own version of them as long as we pay a modest royalty, which we did. We think this is a big problem in music education, since people want to play copyrighted songs, but only old folk songs show up in the instruction books. We also tried to breathe some life into some of the old folk songs, and to treat them the same way we would any song we record.
