Repertory

This stuff can be revelatory for so many music listeners because it operates under the radar. It’s our own musical history, hiding in plain sight, an ocean of raw material awaiting some fresh genius glue to bind it into something new.

This was true at least as far back as the second half of the 19th century.

By then, according to the eccentric roots-music pioneer Harry Smith, enough folk lyrics were kicking around the republic, cross-pollinating between black and white musicians, to provide fodder for thousands of still-to-be-written songs — what the critic Greil Marcus calls “an almost infinite repertory of performances”. So many tales of American experience emerged from that era and its critical mass of storytelling fragments.

Now, the fragmentation has gone global. The character of this new diaspora, though, is different. It now includes high-powered marketing, mass intellectualproperty theft and economic forces that dwarf — sometimes steamroll — the local and regional traditions that spread folk music around in the 1800s.

Today, the practice of harvesting musical and lyrical snippets is flourishing — most creatively, perhaps, in hip-hop and dance music, where readily accessible technology encourages sampling for remixes, remakes, dance mixes and party mixes.

But what to one artist is a nod or tribute can, to another, be theft. And when lyricists and musicians begin drawing not from tradition but from fellow modern, revenue-conscious entertainers, the results get more contentious.

In 1976, former Beatle George Harrison was ordered to pay damages of nearly $1.6 million after a court ruled that his song “My Sweet Lord” had copied musical pieces of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine”, written by Ronnie Mack. The battle went on for years and the damages were later reduced.

In 2015, songwriter Sam Smith agreed to share the royalties for his song “Stay With Me” with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, whose 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down” had melodies similar enough to also give Petty and Lynne co-writing credits.

The list of disputes based on musical similarity goes on: Radiohead (“Creep”, 1992) and Lana Del Ray (“Get Free”, 2017); Huey Lewis and the News (“I Want a New Drug”, 1984) and Ray Parker Jr (“Ghostbusters”, 1984). And many more.

Advertisers recognize the power of the American songbook, too. “Bonaparte’s Retreat”, appropriated by Aaron Copland after being recorded in the field by musicologist Alan Lomax through the fiddler W.H. Stepp, showed up in a recent ad from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The old tune “Turkey in the Straw” was used in the 1970s and 1980s as an ad for Murphy’s Oil Soap.

And several Decembers ago, when I sang “Jingle Bells”, my young son objected. “That’s not a Christmas song,” he said indignantly. “That’s Elmo’s song from the end of his show”. And so it was. Who’s to say I’m any more right than he is?

The wholesale expropriation of music on such a large scale is unprecedented and can be roundly blamed on — or credited to — two things: technology and globalization.

It has produced some genuinely odd mashups. I have found “Edelweiss”, a show tune, cast as a cowboy song; Wham’s elegiac “Careless Whisper” branded as perfect driving music; and Scott Joplin’s 1902 ragtime classic “The Entertainer” pressed into service as a cell-phone ringtone in Islamabad, Pakistan, by a man who didn’t know it but liked it better than the built-in ring. (AP)