Rusty Hudelson is an SPC instructor who has rocked out, gone country, produced easy listening CDs, and currently shares his knowledge with his students to help them succeed in the music industry.

Hudelson, assistant professor of music at the college, teaches a variety of commercial music courses at SPC.

"I teach primarily keyboard and voice, but each semester I'll have one or two harmonica students and even accordion from time to time," he said. "And that's pretty much what I teach, and I teach a class here on modern performance techniques."

About the performance course, the professor explained, the professor replied, "It kind of boils down to trying to teach the students here how to be the best member of a commercial band they can be."

In addition to the instruments Hudelson teaches, he also plays the guitar, the ukulele and an instrument called the Theramin.  The Theramin looks like a wooden box with an antenna and a u-shaped metal bar, with electrical chords attached to it.

"It's kind of an instrument that you play with your hands,” Hudleson said.  “You play the wave form off the antenna and change pitches that way."

Hudelson was born in Kansas. His family moved to Fort Worth when he was 3 months old, before moving to McCallister, Okla. when the musician was 3 years old. He was introduced to the world of music at a very young age.

"My dad was a musician and had a live radio program, so that's really where my musical career started is in radio and that was at about the age of 2," he said. "I can literally say I've done this all my life."

Hudelson would start sing old cowboy songs and songs from the '40s and '50s on the program when he was 3 years old. He said that he started playing keyboards soon after.

"About as soon as I could talk, I could sing, so that was what I did," said Hudelson. "I started playing keyboards when I was about three or four. Been doing that ever since.”

The musician's formal education includes an undergraduate degree in arts and music with an emphasis on keyboards and voice from Lubbock Christian University, in addition to graduate work in pedagogy at Texas Tech.

"Pedagogy really is about teaching, so they have a distinction between performance and pedagogy," he said.

With such a highly competitive market in the music industry, Hudelson believes that teaching offers a certain amount of security.

“The music business is very unstable,” he said. “You know you might do really well one year and be out of work most of the time the next year depending on what group you’re playing with, what music you're into. So it's not something you can really depend on a steady paycheck, as opposed to teaching, which does give you stability.”

The professor has recorded CDs filled with both old standards and original pieces.

"I've got a series of three called ‘Romancing the Tones,’ which is my wife's wonderful idea of a play on words from a movie called ‘Romancing the Stone,’" he said. "These are all easy listening piano arrangements. Most are well-known songs, some are original. I've got about three originals on each CD."

Hudelson says that it is the audience he considers most when composing music.

"The way I go about it, especially with easy listening music, is I try to put down on tape what I would want to listen to," he said. "I really try to consider the people who are going to be listening to it, and then go from that direction. It would be easy to do what I prefer to do, but that probably would not be as attractive to the listener."

This philosophy is taught to students in his classes.

"In my performance class I try to teach my students right off the bat it's all about the audience; It's not about you," said Hudelson.

In addition to the CDs, the professor also sells instructional videos with musical partner John Hartin, the founder of the commercial music program at SPC.

"He started a company called Texas Music and Video that he has used a lot of people in this department, a lot of the instructors, to make videos of whatever their primary instrument is," he said. "And I've probably got 18 or 20 instructional videos that are marketed throughout the world. So that's been very good too; the royalties aren't bad. "

Hudelson's videos instruct viewers in piano and accordion, in genres such as blues, jazz, country and gospel.

The musician has also performed at many different venues during his career. He started out playing in rock bands “The Visions” and “Phogg”.

Hudelson’s wife, Schahara is an instructor with the English department at SPC, while his son-in-law Stuart Moody is an instructor for the Sound Technology program at the college.  He also formed The Hudelson Family, a group featuring himself, his wife and his two daughters. According to Hudelson, his family still hones their musical skills.

"My youngest daughter lives in Seattle with her husband and they do alternative rock music,” he said. "They're really great people and do a great job. My oldest daughter lives here, and she and her husband are actually part of our band now.  We perform as a group called Knights of the West. We're primarily a western swing band."

The musician’s personal favorite kind of music is jazz. Besides listening to his favorite musicians Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck, he plays mostly in the genre.

"I like to play western swing, but the stuff I really listen to is jazz," said Hudelson. “I play a lot of jazz, and I like to tell my students that that's musician's music. That's where you end up if you have gone through all the other genres. That's where you end up."

Hudelson also performs at the Mean Woman Grill in Levelland on Friday nights with Hartin in a show they call “The Living Jukebox”

“We had this idea about five years ago, that we'd been playing together for a long time in various forms, and it became apparent to both of us that we had a really large repertoire of music,” he said. “So I had this idea that, why don't we list about 1,000 songs that both of us know, and we'll put it in menu form, put it out on tables and let people pick the concert. So that's what we did for three hours every Friday night...we had a lot of fun doing it."

The professor also performs gospel music in Lubbock four times a year, in addition to participating in the gospel program at the church he attends.

"I do a traditional gospel show over at the Cactus Theater in Lubbock, and that's another area that I find interesting is the old time gospel," he said.

Hudelson’s view on musical performance is perhaps best summarized by the advice he gives his students.

"I tell them to make sure that it's not about money,” he said. “If they're going into it for the money, it's for all the wrong reasons. Hopefully, they'll be good enough and lucky enough to be able to make a lot of money.  But if that's their motivation, then they'll never have as much money."