Re: [Harp-L] plagarism

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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