I repeatedly see requests like this:

"Do you have the lyrics to A BOY NAMED SUE, by Johnny Cash?"

or

"Does anyone have the chords to CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, by Arlo Guthrie?"

I used to think people did this out of ignorance—that they somehow had the mistaken belief that Johnny Cash wrote A BOY NAMED SUE, that Arlo Guthrie wrote CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, etc. I would try to correct them: "Johnny Cash recorded A BOY NAMED SUE but he didn't write it."

Once, when I did this, the requestor protested: "I didn't say he did write it."*

OK, fair enough, the questioner didn't use the word "write" but he said A BOY NAMED SUE was "by" Johnny Cash. That implies he wrote it, doesn't it?

But it finally sunk in that people weren't necessarily making mistakes about authorship. They were simply using the word "by" differently than I did. They were using "by" to mean "performed by" while I thought it obviously ought to mean only "written by."

Funny, you don't encounter this problem in other fields. You don't hear people say, "I saw Richard III by Ian McKellen" or "Death of a Salesman by Dustin Hoffman"—do you?

I guess it's only in music that people are accustomed to not giving writers and composers any credit, and think that only the performer matters, and that a song somehow "belongs to" the singer whose recording sold the most copies.

Come to think of it, they don't do it in classical music, either. People might say "I have a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Pictures at an Exhibition" but they would never say "I have a recording of Pictures at an Exhibition by Vladimir Horowitz."

Well, I think it's a shame that songwriters aren't given credit. That's why I think people should not say that a certain song was "by" a certain person unless they know for a fact that that person wrote the song. I'm afraid I'm fighting a losing battle, though.

I try to give credit to the songwriter whenever I post lyrics to a song.

Where I tend to get into trouble is when the song is unfamiliar to me, and somebody asks about, say, "JONESBORO BLUES by Elton Conroy" and, without questioning it, I assume they mean that Elton Conroy wrote JONESBORO BLUES, and I assume they know what they're talking about, and so I forget to check. Then, if I find the lyrics at another web site—where, as likely as not, it will say "JONESBORO BLUES by Elton Conroy"—I sometimes copy and paste whatever I find, thus perpetuating the problem.

I hate when that happens.

Just this week, I ran across two old threads where I made this mistake, which is what prompted me to start this thread.

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* I could have replied, with equal justification: "I didn't say you did say he wrote it"—but I didn't. You know how those things go.