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Showing posts from October 3, 2012

Earning a Living With Your Music

Busking at Seattle’s Pike Place Market If you’re not familiar with the terms “busker” and “busking”, well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary the word busk is an English verb dating to a 17 th century French word meaning “to sell” that came to mean “to play music in the street or other public place for voluntary donations” in 19 th century Britain.   So a busker plays music in the street. . . you get the idea.   And busking can be a profitable business for many street performers, at times the musician’s only source of income. One place in this country with a strong busking tradition is New Orleans where musicians, often world-class players, set up in the streets of the French Quarter with a hat on the sidewalk for tips - usually seeded by the busker with a few one and five dollar bills to suggest an appropriate donation.   Over one three week period I watched a succession of wonderful musicians busking in front of the world-famous Cafe' Du Monde'.   Always a