Actionable

Or, occasionally, retooled into something legally actionable. On Monday, a federal jury decided unanimously that pop star Katy Perry and her record label had, with her song “Dark Horse”, copied a 2009 Christian rap song called “Joyful Noise” released by an artist named Marcus Gray.

Perry’s lawyer, Christine Lepera, had taken issue with this line of thinking, saying that “they’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone.”

Legal arguments aside, those basic building blocks — the “alphabet of music” — are responsible for producing huge chunks of the American songbook in ways far more fundamental than most listeners realize.

The likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones built their repertoires by plundering traditional Delta Blues. Bob Dylan made his name remixing the folk canon in innovative ways; “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, for instance, is a direct descendant of a centuries-old British ballad called “Lord Randall”. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair”, with its “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”, traces back straight through American mountain folklore to British tradition.

Think you’re familiar with the 1970 Steve Miller Band classic “The Joker” and its lyrics, “You’re the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree”? North Carolinian Charlie Poole, one of America’s seminal early country musicians, recorded a jaunty song in 1930 called “If the River Was Whiskey”, which included this line: “I was born in Alabama, raised in Tennessee, if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake on my tree.”

Perry