Clapton sued in dispute over song
Bluesman’s estate wants credit for “Corrine, Corrina”
Maybe you’ve heard the simple melody or the call-and-response lyrics to “Corrine, Corrina,” but likely it was a different version performed by the likes of Dylan, Haggard or Willie.
The widely covered blues and country standard was first licensed by Bo Carter in 1929, according to some scholars and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) copyright database. Yet over the years, Carter’s stake to the song blurred with each new variation. And now, a relative of the late bluesman is taking the matter to court to give credit to Carter — and secure millions of dollars in royalties for his estate.
“I didn’t realize how important it was until I started looking at it the last couple of years,” said Miles Floyd, Carter’s stepgrandson, who filed the lawsuit. “This song is a well-known song. I was really surprised.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nashville, alleges musician Eric Clapton attributed the song to the wrong songwriter, Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly), in his 2013 re-release of his “Unplugged” album. It seeks more than $5 million from a slate of songwriters, publishers and broadcasters for receiving the royalties and failing to give Carter proper credit.
“This is a situation where you have the estate, the rightful owners of Bo’s intellectual property, just trying to get what’s rightfully theirs and get credit where credit is due,” said Barry Shrum, Floyd’s lawyer in Nashville. “Bo created this song and started, in essence, a genre in music and influenced many performers in the future, and he deserves that credit.”
Yet, the nature of the blues genre itself leads some to say the case may not be successful.
Carter, whose name was Armenter Chatmon, died in Memphis in 1964. Buried in Mississippi, there have been fundraisers as recently as this month to put a headstone on his gravesite. His estate has now passed on to Floyd, a truck driver living in Jackson, Miss.
The call-and-response song “Corrine, Corrina” was written by Carter before 1928 and was copyrighted and released in 1929, according to the lawsuit. It was later recorded by musicians such as Dean Martin, Big Joe Turner, Taj Mahal, Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and others.
“If you just look at the impact of it, it’s been carried forward and messed with in almost every flavor of roots music there is, which is when you know you’ve got a winner,” said Barry Mazor, whose weekly “Roots Now” show on Acme Radio connects music from past eras to modern musicians and variations.
The song has been done in blues, jazz, pop, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and commercial folk, he said. Bluesmen of Carter’s time relied on those variations to make their work known, and that can at times create a gray area when it comes to copyright law, Mazor said.
“If it wasn’t possible, we wouldn’t have Nashville,” he said. “Getting into the weeds of how much does it have to differ, that has always gone to lawsuits and lawyers. The more money a song makes, the more likely someone is to say, ‘Hey, that’s mine.’ ”
Charles Cronin, a law lecturer at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, reviewed the lawsuit at The Tennessean’s request. Nearly 20 years ago he started a project studying copyright lawsuits. Now called the Music Copyright Infringement Resource, it is sponsored by the law school at USC and Columbia Law School.
He said some details in the lawsuit seem speculative, noting there appeared to be a joint author of the song who also would have had licensing authority, and said it was based on an “extremely tenuous claim.”
Last year and related to a prior lawsuit, Cronin wrote online that Floyd’s claims on the song may not be valid because the song may have already been in the public domain before Carter licensed it.
It was the 1920s and ’30s folk musicians of Carter’s era covered others’ songs and rarely focused on licensing, Cronin said. The blues was an oral tradition often not put down on paper because many people were musically illiterate, he said.
“Rhythm and blues and these old jazz works, they were really meant to kind of morph and change over time, sort of one builds on another,” he said. “That kind of complicates things a little bit more in this case. Clearly the original songwriter was basically a performer and didn’t see this as a fixed way to document the song.
“My hunch is that the original authors would have been happy with the variations on it.”
Carter’s songs were “party records” that tended toward promiscuous, Mazor said. (Example: “Banana in Your Fruit Basket.”) “Corrine, Corrina” was notable in part because of its serious tone. Carter’s albums were well sold in the 1930s as the industry of recording blues tunes was beginning, Mazor said.
More than 85 years later there have been dozens of turns, or variations, of the song. The lawsuit says some songwriters, including Clapton, broke the decades-old copyright and paid royalties to the wrong person.
“Most of those others gave credit where credit was due,” Shrum said. “If that was the case, then there was a proper chain of royalties that flowed through.”
Carter sometimes performed with his brothers as the Mississippi Shieks, considered one of the most prominent African-American string bands of the 1930s. The Sheiks covered the song using “Alberta” instead of “Corrina,” and calling it “Alberta Blues,” according to the lawsuit. Subsequent versions led to “Alberta” and “Corrine, Corrina” becoming interchangeable, the lawsuit says.
In 1940 Ledbetter, who performed as Lead Belly, recorded a song called “Alberta.” The lawsuit says that song was not musically similar to the original “Corrine, Corrina.”
In 1992, Clapton performed Carter’s song on the show “MTV Unplugged” but substituted “Alberta” for “Corrine” and attributed it to Ledbetter, the lawsuit says. It also appears on Clapton’s 2013 deluxe version of the record with attribution to Ledbetter, which was released inside the three-year statute of limitations to sue for copyright infringement, Shrum said. (Clapton first released the song he called “Alberta” on the “Unplugged” album in 1992. The album went on to win multiple Grammy Awards, including album of the year.)
The lawsuit says Clapton should have known better and that he correctly attributed the melody to Carter during a 2011 performance and recording with Wynton Marsalis called “Marsalis & Clapton Play the Blues.”
Floyd is suing Clapton, Warner Music Group Corp., Sony/ATV Music Publishing, EMI Mills Music Inc., Rhino Entertainment Co., Viacom Inc., Folkways Music Publishers Inc., Hal Leonard LLC, J.W. Pepper & Sons Inc. and 10 people listed as “John Doe” in the lawsuit. Those businesses have not yet responded to the lawsuit.