Recording was the first of a series of linked phenomena which forever altered the folk process. Via recording, songs and styles could travel wherever the physical object – i.e. the cylinder or disc – went, and radio removed even that limitation, permitting the music to transform itself into a phantom of the airwaves, solidified and realized by the presence of an appropriately tuned radio receiver. And, via copyright, what was once common intellectual property was effectively privatised. A classic example: during the early ’60s, the British folk singer/guitarist Martin Carthy made the acquaintance of several visiting Americans, two of whom happened to be named Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. During club sessions and late-night jams, Carthy introduced his new friends to his arrangements of a number of Anglo-Celtic traditional pieces. Dylan set a lyric of his own, later recorded as ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, to the melody and guitar arrangement of ‘Lord Franklin’, a technique literally as old as the folk process itself. Indeed, one of his most famous early songs, ‘With God On Our Side’, uses the same traditional Irish melody as Dominic Behan’s ‘The Patriot Game’; and, while the combination of that melody with Dylan’s lyric is copyrighted, the melody itself – one of several known as ‘The Fiddling Soldier’, or ‘The Soldier And The Lady’ – is still ‘out there’. Simon, on the other hand, was particularly intrigued by a tune called ‘Scarborough Fair’, which he and his partner Art Garfunkel subsequently recorded more or less intact. How ever, Simon and Garfunkel copyrighted the arrangement, which – after its use in Mike Nichols’ enormously popular 1968 movie The Graduate – eventually went on to become a Muzak and AOR radio staple and to generate serious amounts of money. The issue of whether or not Simon’s action appropriated Martin Carthy’s creativity and violated his intellectual property is one best left to m’learned friends in the legal profession (or rather, to those who can afford to hire their services), but the end result was the removal of an ancient song from the public domain and its transformation into a copyrighted item for the use of which Simon and Garfunkel must receive payment. There was indeed a financial settlement – the details of which remain relevant only to the participants – but Carthy was more upset by this heisting of what he had considered to be a communally owned cultural asset than by any possible financial loss to himself.
To reverse the argument, the copyrighting of a traditional blues piece has often proved to be the salvation of blues singers who have fallen victim to creative accounting, or – as was often the case with the storefront independent labels who pioneered blues recording – no accounting at all. Big Joe Williams almost certainly wasn’t the author of that beloved old chestnut ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – a Delta staple memorably recorded by Muddy Waters as well as by John Lee Hooker – but the royalties generated by the Waters and Hooker versions (not to mention subsequent covers of the song by assorted blues-rock bands, most prominently the young Van Morrison’s Belfast rude-boy posse Them) provided Williams with some form of compensation for all the songs which he undoubtedly did write, but for which he was never paid. Skip James’ funeral expenses were met by the royalties generated by Cream’s cover of his ‘I’m So Glad’; a version which, incidentally, James despised. Still, it says something for Cream’s integrity that they credited him at all (especially considering that they had rearranged the song so drastically that they could probably have gotten away with claiming it as an entirely new composition), let alone made sure that the money reached him. In the blues world, the person who copyrighted a song might not necessarily be the person who wrote it, and – by the same token – the person in whose name a song was copyrighted wasn’t necessarily the one who collected the money. Case in point: Willie Dixon, who found that while the library of classic songs he composed for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other Chess stars was indeed copyrighted in his name, extracting the resulting moolah from Arc Music, Chess’ music-publishing subsidiary, was another matter entirely.
The conventional notion of song copyright resides in a song’s lyrics, melody and chord changes: register those, and the piece is yours. If someone cops your song – in other words, borrows your melody or lyrics – you can, given sufficient funding to hire heavy-duty lawyers, take them to court and hose them down, big time. (Just ask George Harrison about the ‘My Sweet Lord’ court case, but be prepared to duck.) You can’t copyright a rhythm or a bass line, let alone a ‘groove’; if you could, Bo Diddley would be a seriously wealthy man and James Brown would be infinitely richer than he already is. You can, of course, copyright a recorded performance, and if someone samples a snatch of one of Mr Brown’s records and recycles it without authorization or payment, they’ll soon be hearing from legal eagles representing Mr Brown and/or Polydor Records. ‘I know they say that they’re only taking a little bit of the record,’ says Brown of the sampler-happy hip-hoppers who’ve squeezed so much juice from his inimitable grooves, ‘[but] how would you like it if I cut the buttons off your suit?’ But if somebody wants to assemble a bunch of musicians to play your beat themselves, they’ve got it; and if this wasn’t the case, then most of the history of the blues would consist of lawsuits rather than records. Imagine if someone had successfully copyrighted the twelve-bar blues structure, or the shuffle beat, or the ‘Dust My Broom’ slide-guitar motif (from Elmore James out of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton and beyond), or even the line ‘Woke up this mornin”. Then imagine how many bluesmen would have been able to function freely under the resulting restrictions.
So let’s take stock. On the one hand we have a tradition based on a relatively free-flowing interaction of musical ideas and motifs; on the other a copyright system which tends to reward the cunning and well-connected as well as (in some case, read ‘rather than’) the creative and imaginative. In its own post hi-tech way, the sampling technology which drives rap and dance music would seem to be a way of reviving that free-flowing oral tradition (by ‘quoting’ existing works with all the digital fidelity of a 44,100-Mhz (slices-per-second) sampling rate), but said oral tradition developed in a time when there weren’t millions of dollars’ worth of royalties at stake. There are powerful arguments on both sides: on the ‘oral’ wing, we have the flow of ideas, the collective development of fresh variations of time-honoured traditions, the entire notion of folk and community culture. On the other side of the fence, we have the basic fiscal facts of the entertainment industry, the concept of inviolable intellectual property, and the impregnable right of the individual to receive and, wherever possible, enjoy the rewards of his or her creative labours. And in between, we have an artist like John Lee Hooker, whose work is uncompromisingly based in a deep and rich tradition and which draws freely on the resources of that tradition, but whose indisputable individuality rests on the uniqueness of his relationship with that tradition. The central issues that his oeuvre raises are these: how an artist can simultaneously be an utterly unique creative personage whose achievement, identity and agenda are totally and completely personal, while remaining inextricably linked, in the deepest roots of his creative being, to the cultural tradition of the community in which he was raised; and how that artist, born in 1917 and first recorded at the tail end of the 1940s, could achieve spectacular sales with music which seemed ‘older’ than the earliest country blues records, cut almost a quarter of a century before. The solution to such seeming paradoxes lies in the nature of the relationship between an individual and a tradition; and the innate flexibility of a tradition that not only permits, but specifically demands, that each individual who works within it should make it completely his or her own.
When John Lee Hooker says that he was ‘born with the blues’, he speaks naught but the literal truth: for all practical purposes, he and his chosen art-form are exact contemporaries. Hooker is not actually as old as the blues – no living performer could be – but he is almost exactly the same age as recorded blues. It’s a shame that we have to abandon the 1920 birthdate, because it implies a lovely symmetry; it would have meant that he was born the year that the first blues record – ‘Crazy Love’, a vaguely bluesy urban ballad sung by the otherwise unremarkable Mamie Smith – was released; a mere three years before the first rural blues records were made (by