Certified Contributor II
Posts: 965
Just FYI as I wasn't fully aware of this...I constantly have gotten frustrated with people like A.P. Carter who copyrighted songs they didn't write. However, what I've now learned is there were tons and tons of songs in the so called "public domain" back in the 1920s-1930s that no one benefitted from so the music publishers were pushinig artists to re-record these songs and register them as their own so the publishers could benefit too. A.P. Carter traveled the country collecting songs that he would claim as his own. I was in the middle of changing a song that SHS had set up as an A.P. Carter song "I'll Be All Smiles Tonight" (when there were lots of earlier versions so he clearly couldn't have written the song) when I happened upon an article discussing this. Now it still doesn't explain away the proliferation of folk artists who put their names on everything in the 1950s and such but it's a start.
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Mark