I'm working on the Rise Again songbook, sequel to Rise Up Singing. The publisher, Hal Leonard, is getting most of the copyright permissions, But I've had to track down some of the harder ones (my 30 years of experience as a federal investigator taught me how to track people down).

I don't know what we're going to do on permissions for some of the songs in the Blues chapter. Many came from the late 1920s and early 1930s; and some were recorded over and over again by many performers, each one changing the song a bit or a lot. On so many of these old songs, the ownership is unclear. I hate for some corporation to get paid for something made up by a blues singer who never got much compensation. If Sonny Bono hadn't gotten in the way, all these songs would be free of any doubt, because the old law would have made everything published before 1940 to be in the public domain by the time our book comes out in 2015.

So, it's tough. And you get the feeling that the royalties on old songs aren't going to anyone who deserves them.

-Joe-