For those curious, here is a Willie Ruff Biography. I don't think that he would understand any of this "ownership" business--if anything is clear about him, it is that he believes that all music is a shared culture, and the more people who have contributed to it, the better--

Just to mix things up a bit, I will point out that, contrary to what many may believe, the first American Black Protestant congregations used the same Hymnals and sang the same hymns that everybody else did(many still do). The music that we associate with Black Gospel, the Thomas Dorsey stuff, is new, not traditional. The traditional stuff has always been very far from the mainstream--

It's all good.