Re: [Harp-L] plagarism



Early in my Nashville tenure I played at a small gathering of musicians, one of whom was a well-known harp player, not Charlie McCoy. A guy who had some choice accounts, but was an inferior musician who, let's say, went to the right church. I chatted with the guy for a while, but he sounded ridiculous playing after I did, so the guy who brought him there finally told him he might just shut up and listen.

A few weeks later I heard some of my licks on a record, played by this guy.

I wish I could have sued that guy, but that ain't the way it works.

Until recently you could not copyright an arrangement, and it's certain that most harp solos recorded in the, say, 1950's were not copyrighted. The recordings were copyrighted, but you could copy the record exactly in the studio and put it out all over again if you could find a way to make it pay, which was not easy, as you could obviously not say it was an Elvis Presley record if he didn't actually sing it.

But it DID pay. There was a farily healthy soundalike recording business in Nashville back then. Scotty Moore had a business doing it. I worked for him a few times. Most of the time he could get the exact same cats who had played on the original to come in and do the soundalike. I never got called to soundalike Charlie McCoy, as the real guy was available. The stuff I worked on had harp that was played by some studio guitarist or other who did a second on harp, badly. It's harder to soundalike those guys than it would have been to do it to McCoy, though not by much. (Those records sold for way cheap at truck stops.)

None of this is exactly similar to a guy who drops a famous solo of someone else's into a different tune.

I'm embarrassed for anyone who would do that.

K





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