de=da=duh=D'OH/ bloooooze and thievery

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

At 09.08 -0400 99-10-07, DASLUD at AOL.COM wrote:
>In a message dated 10/6/99 11:54:30 AM, cea20 at CUS.CAM.AC.UK writes:
>>That's how traditional music works :)  This whole
>>originality thing is a weird modern invention.>>
>
> i dont go for the second line, at least as written. in ALL fields, not just
>in music, clearly ==somebody== creates the archetypes from which what
>follows, follows.  it's the music industry itself that's the "weird modern
>invention". ^_~ although its origins begin with the "hits" of stephen foster
>in the mid-19th century.
>it's true, though, that in the folk songs of centuries past you'll find many
>instances of one particular tune representing several songs. i bet this holds
>true around the world. hell, both "the star spangled banner" and "my country
>tis of thee" are derived from other songs. would you call them "ripped off"?
>in these cases it has more to do with 'sharing' the song, conveying some sort
>of =message= with the song, be it a hymn or an olde drinking song...it
>mattered less that there were only so many tunes to go 'round. and no
>royalties to fight about.

Well, the use of the term "ripped off" itself implies fairly modern
concepts of intellectual property rights. In many performance contexts,
each performance was itself a recomposition. A simple analogy has the
performer working from musical "templates", and moreover, if the performer
hears new material that he likes he incorporates it into his own repetoire
and proceeds to (consciously or unconsciously) alter it to his
liking--change the words, change the tune, etc. That applied not just to
music, but to things like the written word as well. You had a book you
liked, you would happily copy bits of it wholesale into your own new
improved version with or without attribution.

By our standards, this is ripping things off. By their standards it was
just doing business as usual.

>in the context of this discussion "thievery" would involve gain or profit on
>the part of the thief. and in led zeppelin's case we have returned to the
>crux of the biscuit.
>"dazed and confused". "how many more times". "whole lotta love". "the lemon
>song".
>"bring it on home". "when the levee breaks". "stairway to heaven". "trampled
>underfoot". all of these songs owe their existence to, specifically, someone
>else's song. (as surely as heart's "barracuda" came from "achilles' last
>stand".) or else it was appropriated altogether. and zeppelin cashed in big
>time.

No doubt about it. However, it is not always possible to know whose song,
really, it was that Zep ripped off. Plenty of trad material--including
blues--is currently copyrighted to the first person who happened to record
it. The nature of traditional material is that it may or may not represent
varying degrees of a performers composition and of pre-existing material.

To a great extent, Zep were only doing what generations of musicians before
them had done. They were doing what most of the "Blues Fathers" had
probably done themselves: combining stuff they heard with stuff they made
up. However, by doing so they violated copyright laws that had not been in
force a century before--and that's the chief difference. Note, I'm not
discussing whether what they did was right or not--that's a legal and
social issue determined by other factors. I'm only discussing the process.

Wearing my folklorists hat,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/