I've been on both sides of this one.

Right from when I first started learning folk songs in the very early 50s, Walt Robertson and others (including Sandy Paton, before he left Seattle) were wide-open and generous about teaching me any songs they knew that I might want to learn. These were folk songs. Nobody owned them and anybody who wanted to sing them could. It was like the Code of Chivalry, or the Code of the Hills, or the Cowboy Way, or whatever. The only way you could wind up "owning" a song was to sing it so well that nobody else wanted to suffer by comparison.

A couple years later, I met a singer who was up from Berkeley and spending the summer in Seattle. He sang a couple of songs that I wanted to learn, and when I asked him, he responded, "Why should I teach you my songs? Get your own!" Others heard that, and I don't think he ever figured out why, from that point on, people around here were polite to him, but very cold. He had broken the Code. Some months later, I found both songs in a copy of Sing Out!, which, of course, is where he'd learned them.

Walt Robertson had a television show on KING in 1952-53. He used Wanderin' as his theme song (same words that Frankie Laine sang on a pop record some years before, but not the same melody). That song became so solidly identified with Walt, that nobody else around here would sing it. Walt is gone now, but I still won't sing it. I wouldn't want the song to drop away and be forgotten, but whoever picks up on it, I certainly hope they sing it well and with respect.

I've always followed a policy of learning and singing any song that I jolly-well wanted to. The only time I recall getting any grief for singing certain songs was from the new wife of a long-time friend of mine. She was somewhat new to this and hadn't really grasped yet what was going on. During the course of an evening, I sang a couple of songs that elicited severe frowns from her. When I had an opportunity to ask her in semi-private what was wrong, she responded haughtily that I was "singing Stan's songs." The implication was that I was usurping his property and "who did I think I was, anyway?" Well . . . first of all, it didn't bother Stan any, and second, I was the guy who had taught the songs to Stan.

There was a period where I did tend to get my nose out of joint a bit. I was singing at one of Seattle's better-known coffeehouses in the University District. The owner operated on a budget big enough to allow him to hire several singers. Singing there was fun because it was like swapping songs in someone's living room, and the audiences enjoyed the banter and informality. But one singer in particular liked the stuff I did—including my accompaniments. He wouldn't come right out and ask me for the words to a song, he would get a couple of confederates to sit there and copy down the words as I sang them. Then a week or so later, he would pop up with the song—and my accompaniment. That is, he attempted to play my accompaniments, but since he played by ear and eye-ball, and some of my arrangements drew on classic guitar and were fashioned after lute-accompaniments, often his attempts were less than successful. Nor was he doing himself any favors by trying to copy my arrangements. My voice was a lot deeper than his, and since most of my accompaniments, runs, etc., were "key-specific," he had to sing them in my keys, and he wound up growling along below his best singing range. Nevertheless, it was damned annoying to come in for my bit and discover that Mike had already sung a bunch of my best songs. I'd go ahead and work them in later in the evening, however.

I think it's a matter of courtesy mixed with self-preservation.
Example 1: Good buddy, one-time singing partner, and long-time friend, Bob Nelson, sings a lot of songs that I really like, because they are good songs and Bob sings then exceptionally well. I do go ahead and learn them, but I won't sing them when Bob is there, nor will I sing them before people who are used to hearing Bob sing them. But for other groups, yes.
Example 2: I sing a lot of songs that Gordon Bok has recorded. Our voices are pretty much in the same range and I love his stuff, so I steal outrageously from him. But if he were in town, I set that part of my repertoire aside. I don't want to be compared to the Real Thing!

Don Firth