This sort of thing has been going on for some time. The BIG question:   are these folks actually from ASCAP, or—?

The following is an excerpt from the memoir / reminiscences of the Pacific Northwest folk scene that I've been working on. The following meeting between Bob Weymouth and myself occurred in 1961. At the time, I was singing regularly Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings at a coffeehouse called "The Place Next Door." It was next door to the Guild 45th theater, which showed art films and foreign films and the coffeehouse was owned by the same man who owned the theater, hence, the name. The "Place" was pretty posh compared to a lot of coffeehouses (your elbows didn't stick to the tables), and in addition to the student crowd from the nearby University of Washington, later in the evening, it drew a lot of the after-show crowd, not just from the theater, but from downtown: the symphony, ballet, and opera. The owner of the place paid fairly well compared to most coffeehouses in the area, and he paid regularly. Good gig!

Clark's Red Carpet was a plush restaurant and cocktail lounge downtown, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Olive Street. The Clark family owned a chain of restaurants around Seattle. The Red Carpet frequently had entertainment in the cocktail lounge, and someone told me that a folk singer named Bob Weymouth was singing there. I'd never heard of him, so I went to the Red Carpet to see him.

Bob Weymouth was actually more of a popular singer. What made him a "folk singer" was that he accompanying himself on the guitar. A handsome fellow with a good, light baritone voice, he sang a whole variety of things: popular songs, Broadway show tunes, some country and western—and a few of the more "popular" folk songs. His guitar work was adequate for the job, but nothing fancy—he thumb-strummed, using simple, basic chords.

We got to talking between sets, and he was very pleasant and friendly. Clark's Red Carpet was covered by the musicians' union, so he was getting paid at least union scale, which was somewhat more than what most coffeehouses could afford to pay. Were it not for the money (or lack thereof), he was interested in coffeehouse folk singing and thought coffeehouses would be pleasant places to perform. The beverages in Clark's Red Carpet's cocktail lounge were alcoholic, of course, and although it was a fairly up-scale place and things were generally agreeable most of the time, he did have to put up with the occasional loud-mouthed drunk.

He asked me if coffeehouses were having the same trouble that lounges were having: people coming in demanding that the management pay them ASCAP or BMI money for any live music that was played. Not as far as I knew, I told him. In the coffeehouses that specialized in folk music—and that was almost all of them—it wouldn't do anyone much good to try to collect royalties, because the vast majority of what we sang was public domain. If the issue ever did come up, we could just do some minor pruning of our repertoires to make sure we didn't sing any copyrighted material.

He said that Clark's solution when these blokes came in was first to insist on seeing some kind of credentials. Usually all they had was a business card, and sometimes not even that. Then Clark would tell them that he had no one to keep track of the music. The entertainer was too busy entertaining and the bartenders and waitresses were busy with their own duties. He wasn't about to hire someone just to sit there and write down song titles. If they wished, they were welcome to send somebody in to keep track of the music and then present an itemized list of selections and how much in royalties was owed for each. The alleged royalties collector usually made some angry threats, then stomped out never to be seen again. But it had happened several times with several different people, each one claiming to be the official ASCAP or BMI representative.

Everybody wants a piece of the pie!

© Copyright 2010, Donald Richard Firth

If someone shows up with his hand out, the first thing you should do is ask for some credentials, then make some telephone calls and check to see if they are really who they say they are.

Don Firth