Honouring the song 5: who wrote or arranged the song?

I’ve written before that even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it.

 

The identity of that individual may have been lost over time, but to honour the song, you still have the responsibility to try to find out who it was.

Honouring the song 1: where does the song come from?

When honouring the origins of any song, you need to be as precise as you can about where the song came from.

 

It might be hard to find out, but there is no excuse for being lazy and saying something like “This song is from Africa.” Here are some things to consider when tracing a song’s origins.

New season, new songs – how to find new repertoire for your choir

Here in the UK autumn is in the air. Choirs often start back in September, a time when new songs are needed.



I’m here to help! Here are some resources for finding new songs for your choir.

Choirs and copyright: a beginner’s guide for the bewildered

[NB this post is about UK copyright laws. Although the situation will be similar in other countries, the various copyright and performing rights agencies and websites will obviously be different]

I wrote extensively about copyright way back in 2010 (see my series of seven posts Songs and copyright), but I still get emails every week from choir leaders asking me questions!



I’m certainly no expert, especially since I don’t use sheet music, but I thought I’d revisit the topic and try to spell it out in simple terms. Here goes!

Stop chasing after songs for your choir – learn to respect, research and relax

There are people out there desperate to find more songs for their choir.

photo by Victor Grigas

They record everything at singing workshops, go to song swap sessions at every opportunity, exchange songs over the internet, and pester workshop leaders for their arrangements.

They can’t ever get enough! It almost becomes an obsession to capture songs in any way they can.

Songs and copyright 7: alternatives

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen how copyright works and considered both the legal and moral angles.

Some people have a problem with the current law, feeling that it is too restrictive. However, they still want to have some control over their intellectual property. This week I look at several alternatives to the existing copyright laws.

public domain

The simplest way to make a song available to everyone is to put it in the public domain. Sometimes people use the term ‘public domain’ in a loose fashion to mean ‘free’. However, ‘public domain’ is a legal term and means, precisely, ‘not copyrighted’. A work is in the public domain either because its copyright has expired, or the owner of the work forfeits their rights over it.

Under the Berne Convention, which most countries have signed, any literary or artistic work is automatically copyrighted. Therefore, if you want a work to be in the public domain, you must take some steps to disclaim the copyright on it. This isn't very hard to do — the copyright holder merely has to make a statement that they release all rights to the work. Once this irrevocable act is complete they no longer have any power over how the work is used since it is then owned by the public as a whole.

It is controversial, however, whether it is possible for a copyright holder to truly abandon the copyright of their work. Some scholars of copyright law, agree that it is difficult to put works in the public domain, but not impossible. The Creative Commons website, for example, has a public domain dedication form which produces an electronic receipt which is meant to act as legal backing for the dedication. It might be that another licensing option, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Only license (see below), is a safer choice.

creative commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

There are a range of licenses available where you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify. Ranging from attribution only (i.e. as long as people say where the work came from, they can then do anything they like with it), to attribution, non-commercial, non-derivatives (i.e. people must say where the work came from, can’t use it commercially, and can’t alter it or build on it in any way).

If you visit the home page of this blog: http://blog.chrisrowbury.com you will see that it is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 which means that I am allowing anyone to copy and make derivative works of any of my posts as long as they acknowledge that I wrote the original.

copyleft

In general, copyright law is used by an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it but require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement. This is called copyleft. Copyleft type licenses are a novel use of existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available.

Copyleft is usually associated with computer programs, but it can also be applied to music. When a work is ‘copylefted’, it means all derived works (even if they mix in other works as well) must be distributed under the same terms (usually the same exact license) as the original work. Licenses can be obtained through Creative Commons. Copyleft is sometimes known as Share Alike.

informal arrangements

Whilst retaining copyright, you can make clear that you are giving users certain freedoms over your intellectual property. For example, putting “This page may be photocopied” on sheet music (e.g. the OUP’s Voiceworks series)

change the law!

Some people believe that the current copyright system is failing, but rather than adapting it, they are calling for wholesale change. There is a recent article from the BBC World Service – Copyright: time to change the laws? – which considers why the current system is now out of date.

further reading

Tom Ewing wrote an article in The Guardian pointing out that modern music marketing (i.e. giving away music for free) is close in spirit to the Native American practice of potlach.

A story in The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses lessons from the history of book publishing, the evolution of copyright and what might happen in the future. “History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit.”

Counterpoint online has started a debate on the future of copyright. It’s 300 years since the passing into law of the very first copyright act the British Council Creative Economy Team has launched a debate and year-long series of forums framed by the question: if copyright hadn’t been invented, what kind of copyright would we want?

The Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University has created a course called ‘Copyright for librarians’. Module 6 of the course looks at Creative Approaches and Alternatives.

the end

Well, that wraps up this series of seven posts on songs and copyright. A complex subject, but I’ve tried to give as clear an explanation as I can. I’d love to hear your views on the series. Do drop by and leave a comment.

If you’ve missed the rest of this series, here are links to the other posts:

1. Even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it
2. Basic principles of copyright
3. Different kinds of rights
4. How the law works
5. Who owns the song?
6. How to get permission to use a song
7. Alternatives

 

UPDATE (14 July 2015)

Since I wrote this post I’ve written two others that might be of interest:

Choirs and copyright: a beginner’s guide for the bewildered

Copying music: how to stay on the right side of the law

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Songs and copyright 5: who owns the song?

We saw last week that copyright law is an attempt to protect the rights of the creator(s) of a song. These rights include being acknowledged as the song’s writer(s) and having control over how the song is used by others. The song writer is said to own the song as a piece of intellectual property.

Indian village musicians by Sukanto Debnath

But what if we don’t know who wrote the song or if the song writer is dead or if the music publishing company has gone out of business or if two different people each claim to have written the song?

Before we can even begin to speak about what rights somebody might have over a particular song, we need to know who owns it.

the original owner

When a song is first composed, the owner of the song is the person or people who wrote the music and the lyrics. These song owners then have automatic rights over their creation for a period of time established by law.

If the song is later written down and published or recorded in any way, then those publishers have ownership of the publishing and recording rights. Publishing and record companies are free to sell their songs to other people, thus getting further and further away from the original song writer.

For example, Michael Jackson used to own the publishing rights to pretty much every Beatles’ song. To beat bankruptcy, he sold his share of the rights to Sony in 2006.

traditional songs

Traditional songs that have been handed down from generation to generation seem to have come from nowhere, but somebody wrote them at some time. Unfortunately, we often don’t know who that individual is since such songs mutate and evolve over time. That is why there are so many songs credited to ‘anon’!

Many world cultures have never written their songs down and don’t even have the concept of ‘authorship’. In these days of global communication, it is very easy for Western musicians to appropriate such songs and claim rights over them.

The Smithsonian recently held an online conference on the subject of Who owns music? looking at the ethical and even philosophical questions which Smithsonian Folkways Recordings must wrestle with as it gathers the music of cultures around the world.

Click on “Access Archive” to hear a recording of Folkways’ D. A. Sonneborn telling stories of the music makers he’s met in a session that considers the idea of ownership in its largest sense.

selling songs to other people

For a variety of reasons, song writers sometimes decide to sell their songs to somebody else. Maybe they need to make money, or they’ve been tricked somehow, or they think that by selling it the song will get wider recognition.

mbube

Many of us are familiar with the pop song “The lion sleeps tonight” which was a hit for Tight Fit in 1982. This song is an adaptation of an earlier version called “Wimoweh” recorded by The Weavers in the 1950s.

The original song, “Mbube” was written by Solomon Linda in 1939. It was a huge success in his native South Africa. Linda sold his rights to the song for 10 shillings (less than $US 2) to the record company shortly after the recording was made.

The original recording was discovered by American musicologist Alan Lomax in the 1950s who passed it on to his friend Pete Seeger who was in The Weavers. Seeger assumed the song was in the public domain so The Weavers credited it to Paul Campbell, a fictitious entity used to copyright material.

Years later the song was used by the Disney Corporation in their movie The Lion King, earning an estimated US $15 million in that movie alone. Solomon Linda didn’t see a penny of this and died in poverty in 1962.

In February 2006, Linda's heirs reached a legal settlement with Abilene Music, who held the worldwide rights and had licensed the song to Disney.

you are my sunshine

Another example is You are my sunshine. First recorded in 1939, the song is copyright 1940, words and music by Jimmie Davis (who later went on to become Louisiana’s state governor) and Charles Mitchell.

The song was first recorded by the Pine Ridge Boys on August 22, 1939; the Rice Brothers Gang recorded it on September 13, 1939; Jimmie Davis bought the ‘rights’ to the song from Paul Rice for $35 in late 1939. Davies never claimed to have written the song, but Paul Rice claimed to have composed it in 1937.

But the song wasn’t Rice’s to sell. According to an article by Theodore Pappas in 1990, There are still people alive, who remember hearing the song long before 1937 - in particular, a mid 1930s performance of the song by Riley Puckett himself - and what these people remember is the name of the musician with whom both Riley Puckett and Paul Rice played in the early 1930s:  Oliver Hood of LaGrange, Georgia.

disputed ownership

There are many other examples of disputed ownership, some of which have never been resolved. Here are two examples.

tsena tsena

Tsena, tsena is another song recorded by The Weavers! It is a very popular Israeli song composed by Issachar Miron in 1941.

In about 1947 an American, Julius Grossman, added a third part to Miron’s song which ended up being published in 1949 and credited entirely to Grossman. Miron took Grossman to court in 1954 and won.

The court case makes fascinating reading and gives an insight into the complexities of copyright law. One interesting claim was that neither party wrote the song at all, but that it was in the public domain long before 1941 so was freely up for grabs!

malaika

The song Malaika was made famous by the South African singer Miriam Makeba although it was first recorded by Kenyan musician Fadhili William and his band Jambo Boys in 1960.

Authorship of the song is often attributed to Fadhili William, but that is somewhat disputed. It appears that the song was written in the 1940s by a Tanzanian, but at least two song writers claim it. There are also claims from Kenya and other East African countries. It may be that William wrote one of the verses, but it’s almost certain that he didn’t write the whole song.

There is no clear owner of the song, although Fadhili William is now generally recognized as the composer for royalty purposes.

stealing songs

Whether consciously or not, many song writers end up ‘borrowing’ tunes or lyrics from other songs. Some even go as far as claiming a song as their own composition even though they know it was written by somebody else.

A famous example of ‘borrowing’ bits of tune was George Harrison’s court case claiming that he had plagiarised the melody for “My sweet Lord” from the 1963 hit single “He’s so fine.”

is it really in the public domain?

Many songs appear to be in the public domain (i.e. not covered by intellectual property rights) because they are very old or nobody knows who owns them. But the way that copyright law works, even if the original song writer is long dead, somebody may still ‘own’ the song.

A couple of years back I released a live CD with my community choir WorldSong. Before we could produce the CD, we had to check whether we had permission to record each of the songs.

One of the songs we wanted to put on the CD was How can I keep from singing? This song is a Christian hymn written by American Baptist minister Robert Lowry (1826 – 1899). Since he died so long ago, I naturally assumed that the song was now in the public domain.

When I received the paperwork back from MCPS (the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) I was informed that the song’s UK copyright is held by Harmony Music Ltd. and the song is credited to Sankey and Plenn.

The song was published by Lowry in 1869. He claimed to have written the music, but he didn’t say where the lyrics came from. In 1878 the American gospel singer and composer Ira D. Sankey published his own setting of the words, writing that the words were anonymous.

Doris Plenn learned the original hymn from her grandmother, who reportedly believed that it dated from the early days of the Quaker movement. Plenn contributed an additional verse around 1950, which was taken up by Pete Seeger and other folk revivalists who modified much of the overtly Christian wording.

So it seems that the song is still in copyright because of the extra lyrics added by Plenn in the 1950s. I still haven’t found out how come the copyright is held by Harmony Music!

Just because a song is old, doesn’t mean that it’s automatically in the public domain.

next week

Next week I’ll be looking at how you go about getting permission to use a song in order to perform it, record it, arrange it, etc. Also how to claim rights over your own song writing. This will refer to the situation in the UK only I’m afraid.

This is the fifth in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:

1. Even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it
2. Basic principles of copyright
3. Different kinds of rights
4. How the law works
5. Who owns the song?
6. How to get permission to use a song
7. Alternatives

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com