Re: [Harp-L] Willie Dixon Controversy

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Song stealing in the Fifties, and before and since, was as common as 
dirt.  Credit "sharing" even moreso.

I worked for a company that bought the Starday/King publishing 
catalog.  Going through this enormous catalog I kept seeing the same name 
appearing as a writer or co-writer on thousands of country and R&B songs, 
many of them very big hits.  I no longer remember that name, but this name 
even appeared on the original contracts, as one of the writers, signature 
and all.  I finally ran into someone who had worked at King and he told me 
that that was the pen name of the owner of the two companies, and he always 
got the publisher's half and generally got half of the writer's royalty by 
insisting on being listed under the fictitious name as the "co-writer."

We were re-copyrighting the entire catalog, song by song, to take advantage 
of the then-new 1978 copyright laws.  The catalog had a great deal of 
material that was in fact old public domain folk songs.  In those cases the 
owner of the catalog had copyrighted those as sole writer, under his 
fictitious name.

We re-copyrighted those, too.

There are four principles to stealing a song.
1. Back in the 50's, and going forward and backward, many singers who wrote 
their own material had no idea that you got money when the records sold or 
were played on radio and TV.  In fact, many had no idea what the names in 
the parenthesis on the record label were.  They were hoping to make money 
on record sales and on better pay for their live shows.
2. It's a penny business.  The idea that it's a penny business hides the 
fact that those pennies add up if you have a hit.  So if someone else wants 
the credit and the pennies, big deal.  Right?
3. If the record company also owned the publishing company, and they almost 
always did, you didn't get a fair accounting no matter WHO got credit.  So 
why bother fighting?
4. Shared credit, or stolen credit, was presented as a fait 
accompli.  Either you agree to this, or we aren't even going to put out the 
record.  Many artistes couldn't believe their luck at being recorded in the 
first place.  (Imagine if someone were making a documentary about blues 
harmonica players.  They said, "Your music can be in the movie, but you 
will get no money from it ever, and we get to make money from it as long as 
the copyright lasts."  That couldn't happen, could it?  Nobody would fall 
for that, would they?)

Now, copyrighting folk songs is a very interesting species of -- is it 
theivery?  If the writer of a lyric or melody is long dead or obscured in 
the mists of the past, why the hell not grant oneself the credit?, some 
would argue.  How the heck are you going to figure out who really wrote 
Spoonful, especially if you are changing it all around and making it into a 
commercial song anyway.  Did Bo Diddley write Bo Diddley?  Did he write 
that rhythm?  (He made both things special all over again.  He took 
composition credit, and then took the name as his own.  Did he get paid 
every nickel he had coming?  Who knows?)

Here's a great twist on all this.  Leiber and Stoller wrote Hound Dog for 
Willy Mae Thornton, at the request of her producer Johnny Otis.  Johnny 
Otis informed them that the Duke/Peacock record label would be publishing 
the song and that he'd be taking a third of the writer's credit and the 
back-end.  Leiber and Stoller agreed.  What could they do?

But then the record came out and the song was credited to "Otis-Robey", 
Robey being Don Robey, the Dallas gangster who owned the record 
label.  Leaving Leiber and Stoller off the credits turned out to be a 
gigantic mistake on the part of Otis and Robey.

Leiber told me that he wanted to let it go, but that it really irked 
Stoller, so they pursued a suit against Otis and Robey.  Four years later 
they won the suit, based on the idea that they had signed the contract when 
they were minors.  Both the writers' credit and the publishing reverted to 
them, not long before Elvis Presley made the song one of the most valuable 
copyrights in publishing history.

But here's where it even gets weirder.  As the hipsters on this list 
probably know, the original song is sung by a woman who is kicking a 
free-loading gigolo out of her house.  There is nothing about 'never caught 
a rabbit' anywhere in there.  It would have to be changed significantly in 
order to make it a song a male would sing.

A year before they won back all rights to Hound Dog, a band named Freddie 
Bell and the Bellboys made the adaptations needed to allow them to sing 
it.  They changed the melody, the length of the lines, they changed just 
about everything except for that magical first line.  They made a record of 
it, and that got them work in Las Vegas as a lounge act, and that's where 
Elvis heard their version, which is the one he recorded.

The song was as different from the original as Willie Dixon's Spoonful was 
from Charley Patton's.  But Freddie Bell's record label credited the song 
to Leiber and Stoller, and so did Elvis' label, RCA.  It happens that 
Leiber and Stoller were probably the greatest songwriters of the era, and 
they went on to write more than 30 more songs for him because of Hound Dog.

So fighting for their rights, and owning them even when the song was 
significantly altered, made Leiber and Stoller a pile of money.

Now, whenever we get into a money discussion on Harp-l someone chimes in 
and says "I don't care about any of this, why can't music just be about the 
fun of playing music?"

I agree with you whole-heartedly.  Mind if I take your publishing?




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