////But the USA has been a racially segregated society for a lot of it's history and access to recording has not been equal. It would have been far easier for a white performer to record an imitation of a black singer than for the original artist to get his performance on disk (or tape or Wire, or even in a notebook, since non-standard scales and swung timings were a closed book to most manuscript-based classically trained musicologists).
You may have heard the quote from Ahmet Ertegun that when he asked other record companies what royalties he should pay, he was told "We don't pay no royalties to n******!" (Check the story of Danny and the Juniors or Soloman Linda too)////

Undoubtedly whites had more access to recording facilities and undoubtedly some of these whites heard some black sng somewhere, recorded it and took credit for writing it. But, again, my point is, for that to have happened, the white public had to be far more open to it and knowledgeable of it than we are led to believe today by the "scholars" (read as "idiots with degrees").

As far as royalties go, the recording industry might have been the only place where a white artist could be screwed over as easily as a black artist. As far as I know, the first time a royalty was ever paid to an artist was when John Stark of Missouri offered one to Scott Joplin for "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899. So it wasn't like all white publishers were all screwing black artists over. Likewise, Clarence Williams worked as an A&R man for OKeh Records and he was known to trick artists into signing up for shady deals. Fats Waller used to sell the same song to ten different publishers. One publisher said he usually bought whatever song Fats pedaled to him even though he knew Fats had just sold it to some other office down the hall.