Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay: The dodgy business of popular music by Simon Napier-Bell

Author:Simon Napier-Bell [Napier-Bell, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Business
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2014-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

28

The Times They Are a-Changing

ALBERT GROSSMAN

Woodie Guthrie never wanted a swimming pool. And he never much cared about money. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. He was loosely called a folk singer, but he wasn’t really. He’d traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California, learned traditional folk and blues, and written songs about his experiences during the Great Depression. But he was never interested in making money from them. In 1935, in a songbook distributed to listeners of an L.A. radio show, he wrote, “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of our’n, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

In 1965, Guthrie was fifty-three, but his lyrics were full of the ideas young people thrived on. If he’d been twenty years younger he would have written a dozen best-selling albums. Instead, in the new age of long-playing records, Bob Dylan arrived to do it for him.

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