Lead Sheets and You, The Music Theoretician

If you've performed popular or jazz music anytime in the past century, you may have come across the lead sheet.
A lead sheet, which is generally housed in a Fake Book, is a musicians short hand performance guide to a piece of music. Here is an example:

A lead sheet generally gives the performer the basic elements to "fake" a performance of the song in question. With the melody and chords (often lyrics as well) the performer is meant to recreate the song based on their understanding of the style of music. This is also how songs become transformed beyond the original composers intentions. As more and more artists "fake" their own version of the song, it can often become re-composed and re-imagined generation after generation.

Today we will analyze the lead sheet example from above, and begin to create our own lead sheets based on our own original melodies.