The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #98474 Message #3020285
Posted By: Stringsinger
31-Oct-10 - 05:44 PM
Thread Name: 'Are you SURE you wrote that?'
Subject: RE: 'Are you SURE you wrote that?'
"And of course there's always "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes"/"Great Speckled Bird"/"Wild Side of Life"/"It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels", and whatever else uses that approximate tune."
The Prisoner's Song: If I Had The Wings of an Angel, oe'r these prison bars I would fly..."
Probably the first recorded of that tune.
The reasonable answer is pretty simple. Tunes are recycled all the time. Even lyric themes in different forms. When a song is folk-like, by definition it is familiar. When it is sophisticated like as in a show song, then it isn't automatically familiar and takes some getting used to as an entity. For example, Jerome Kern's "All The Things You Are". One would be hard put to find an antecedent of this tune. The same can be said for Cole Porter's songs or Stephen Sondheim's or George Gershwin's. In the arena of popular music from the 60's on, folk melodies found their way into the radio songs. This means that their popularity was based on their familiarity which came about because those tunes had been heard before in other songs. A lot of this was the result of BMI (Bad Music Incorporated) which came about as a broadcasters rebellion against ASCAP wanting to raise their rates for airplay. Folk-like tunes which didn't come under ASCAP jurisdiction were used freely. (BMI actually means Broadcast Music Incorporated as contrasted from
ASCAP (American Society ofComposers, Authors, Publishers).
A song as an entity requires a uniqueness that transcends lyrics and melodies. Even though Woody probably recycled the tune for "Ludlow Massacre", that song remains unique enough to have motivated Howard Zinn to activism
In short, when it comes to tunes, who cares? Lyrics define the mood and feeling of a unique song which is amplified by an appropriate tune. An original folk tune is a red-herring.