 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. I'm Melvin Hunt and I'm from the Leech Lake Reservation in the Walker area. It's called Onigum is the Village that I'm from. The kind of music that I've done, that I've recorded, I would say basically is country-flavored. That's my influence. It's been country and early rock and roll from early 50s. When did you first get into music? I was about 10 years old. My mother wanted me to play guitar and sing. At that point I was disinterested. However, she did spend some money to get an old Sears rollbook, kind of a little flat top guitar. She had some investment in it, so she bought that old used guitar for me. I knew she was serious. So I thought, well, geez, maybe I better learn this and see how I like it. There were some older fellows in the village that I was raised at, too, that also played guitar. They seemed to be popular and they seemed to have gotten invited to the parties, the local parties. They always seemed to have the pretty girlfriends. It was kind of appealing to me. I kept on going and I pastored all of them. Show me this. How do you tune the guitar? Show me this riff. I guess I bothered everybody enough to the point where I had learned basically everything that they knew. At that point I was maybe 12, 13 years old. Then I got a whole of an old used instruction manual. I learned the chords that way, the exact positions. Listen to the radio, kind of follow along, play along, what key are they in. So that was my introduction to the guitar and to music. I didn't know anything about writing or anything at that point. Just doing cover songs, just copying other people what they were doing. One of the songs that I do is called Prairie Flower and as it was relayed to me, a guy met a lady and she impacted his life and he started writing the song and he never seen or heard of her again. But the impact was imprinted on him. He carried that for a long time. So he wrote that song Prairie Flower and he gave it to me and I finished it up. I did some of the words on it, embellished it a little bit on some of the words in the guitar. So you got into performing shortly after you started learning? Then I had some fellow high school students that also played in a basement and I had heard about them through, you know, the grapevine in school. They'd say, oh, you know, so-and-so can play. And they had also heard about me that I could play and we kind of got together and we started the beginning of learning how to play a song from beginning to end and to get all of the chord changes and the words and the timing and basically how to be a band or a team to make sure that we all do our part in the song. And when did you get into writing your own songs? That was a late, late thing in life. I did cover material. I had a friend, a buddy of mine that we started a band in the early 80s and he was a writer. He wrote songs and he wrote some of the incidences that would happen to me. He would say, you know, that's the beginning of a good song and he would start something off and we'd talk about it and then I'd add some things and I didn't know how to do it but I would just add some things and he would, you know, change the format a little bit and start to kind of put it into where we could make a song out of it and that's where I became interested because I liked his choice of words and I liked the way he encouraged me to do it also. He was very patient with me. He was an excellent, excellent guitar player but he also had a lot of patience to bring me along and to encourage me. I mean I could do the fundamentals and that stuff but he took me into the finer parts of the guitar. And how is it different for you performing your own songs as opposed to when you're playing covers before? I used to think that, oh, people don't want to listen to what I've written and, you know, I didn't put too much credence, if you will, on the songs that I wrote because they were so simple and easy, easy to do. There was nothing complicated about any of them and I just didn't think that there was anybody who would enjoy them so when I did them and I started adding one or two into my live shows that I do where I do covers and people have actually asked for a couple of my songs now which is really rewarding, it feels good. You don't know that somebody recognizes my songs. So when you're writing a song, does it usually, you have lyrics first or do you have a melody in mind first? I have a feeling first. And generally, like I said, I'm kind of blue or a relationship is ended or something out of the norm has happened to me that's affected me emotionally and then I can start to draw on some words and then kind of start putting them down, you know, some kind of order. And I can do that real quick sometimes when one of the songs I remember I wrote in maybe a half hour but I didn't have the melody. I just had a bunch of words but they all meant something to my heart and then a little bit later as I started working on them I started kind of putting them in order like my mentor did when I first started and then I started laying out the words according to a song and so between the two or three different melodies that I hear in my mind then I come out kind of like with my own melody and sometimes that comes real fast too. I just can't sit down, make up the words, make up the melody I just I gotta feel it and then it kind of flows. Many words sometimes really fast. That's how they work. What are some influences on your songs? What I have found is that when I'm emotionally involved or emotionally kind of out of the norms those are the times that I can really write. I mean it just kind of flows up but it's not a song yet but it's kind of getting feelings out and then kind of putting them down and then put it in a pile. You know there are several piles I had over the years and when I retired from my career I had all these songs I still had the desire to play and I thought now is the time to get these things together get them formatted properly get some melodies to them maybe change the words and so it was a process of maybe three, four years of getting them together and getting them down myself to learn the melody and to try to jive the melody with the lyrics lead riffs with the guitar there's just a lot of little things that went into it and I finally came up with about seven songs that I do that are my songs and a couple of them are my rendition of a couple of songs that I have put on my CD. And so did you take a break from performing live? No, I performed in high school and I got the rush from performing and then I put it on the side when I got married and raised a family got in my career but still played all along on the side and then in like the mid-80s I kind of fired up a weekend band in South Minneapolis and that was kind of a necessity too because it gave me something to do on the weekends to make a little bit of money that I would use toward the offset get the kids some pizza send them to a movie a little extra gas money for the car things like that so it started to kind of support itself so I just kind of kept on going with it and kind of has kept on going and we currently are in the area playing. And what's the experience like for you performing in front of an audience? It's a gratification it's being recognized for something that I work at I'm not a good guitarist I enjoy it I enjoy playing and to do all of the legwork during the day getting the equipment, writing, doing this stuff and then to perform, that's the payday when you go live and you start to do your music and people like it you know, it's a payday that's how it is for me. This next song that I'm going to do I co-wrote with a friend of mine who was who's got on to the final journey he started the song I added to it between the two of us we came up with a song I'm honored to do it Brother Dave Wilson What advice would you give someone who is interested in becoming a musician what would you suggest to them to try and do? I guess the best thing is if you could shadow somebody that already knows how to play and for somebody that has already done it for somebody who's already written I know in Walker there's a community center they have music writing classes to technically know how to do the writing the other thing that I would encourage anybody to do is to learn how to play guitar get a mentor or take music lessons and it's going to cost you but anytime you pay for some kind of a service you take advantage of it because you're paying for it you've got vested in it so I would suggest that anybody take some professional writing course learn how to play guitar by a professional haven't teach you because they can say it right there and they can answer your question because I went by a book and I didn't know what questions to ask I didn't know count one, two down stroke and then one up so I was doing that kind of stuff whereas if you could just get a mentor to have somebody come in and do it with you that's what I would recommend to somebody This is our third year doing this and bringing back the show it seems like every person I've interviewed there seems to be like that one person when they were growing up that kind of encouraged them to learn to play taught them how to play and convinced them to start performing live What do you think it is about the music community that there seems to be a feeling of helping out other fellow musicians That's what I've noticed is that very thing because even today I'll call somebody and I'll say hey we're doing this song they're doing something in it and I'm not sure what they're doing and then they'll tell me well what song is it and nowadays you can go on YouTube and you can technically see it what they're doing and so that's what I used to do is reach out to people and have them explain to me what they're doing and it's good to have somebody that can tell you because sometimes I can't follow intricately all the things that they're doing and so sometimes I'll just skip a few notes here and there just as long as I got the anatomy of the song I have to understand it first and I can learn it eventually but I'm one of those kind of guys too that has to learn over and over and over so I still play pretty hard and I still try to learn you know me and my knee-jeeze from the rest we don't care what anybody says the Warbelle buckles face the floor we don't need straight mac anymore S-D-A-T-S-T-N-F-I-N food stamps and commodity cheese it's taking its toll got a doom has turned me into a come on bod so we're called they've got come on bods so we're called we'll show them too close on Sunday mornings we try to regroup start our day with hangover soup while the rest of the month we have no jingle so I go out next single come on come on bods we're so we're called we'll show them I did a song called Fry Bread Queen it's kind of a humor it's a humor song because I think as Native Americans I think we got a real good sense of humor and we can poke fun at each other in a good way and so I wrote a song called Fry Bread Queen it's an early rock and roll and there it's got some humorous words and some of the words I've heard at powwows so I kind of grasp onto things boy that would be a good word that would be a good lyric for a song so I hang on to things like that there's so much talent out here we just ooze with talent here in this area and if there's anybody out there from the reservation, from Leech Lake White Earth, Red Lake, any place even the local communities the little Longville, Reamer the little towns like that that are on here if anybody would like to start it on something and if I can help I would be happy to so that's what I'd like to say This is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008 If you enjoy watching Backroads Online please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org