Q. Then what was Lonnie Donegan's agent doing in Moe Asch's office trying to claim composer rights on a song which had been collected, and incidentally copyrighted by John Lomax, 20 odd years earlier. Donegan was entitled to make another arrangement of Rock Island Line. Nobody is disputing that. But arranging a piece is one thing. Claiming authorship is another. And before anyone asks, I'm not trying to justify John Lomax's own copyrighting activities.

M. Ted. You are perfectly correct. Moscow Nights was written by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy Mikhail Matusovsky, not as I think I previously said by trad. Nevertheless that didn't stop Ball from claiming the authorship. I wonder if the fact that Russia was not then a signatory to the Berne convention had anything to do with that.