Since I started taking this class, I have been thinking a lot about Bob Dylan. I have been a fan of Dylan most of my life, and am well aware that a great majority of his music from when he first started writing music in the early 1960s was based on other songs. This was often how folk music worked—artists would ‘borrow’ from other artists.
Dylan came to New York because his idol, Woody Guthrie, was dying in New Jersey and he wanted to meet him before he died. Woody was thrilled when Dylan played his music back to him, and was happy to have someone carry on his legacy. He even wrote a song in 1961 called “Song to Woody” which had an identical tune to Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. He even took a line from another Guthrie song, “Pastures of Plenty” which said “Every state in this union, us migrants has been/We come with the dust and we go with the wind” and said “Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men/That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.”
Even some of Dylan’s more popular songs from that time were based on other songs and literature; “A Hard Rains Gonna Fall” (Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? And where have you been, my darling young one?) was based on the poem “Lord Randall”, which some of you may remember from Brit Lit in high school (Oh, where ha’ you been, Lord Randal my son? And where ha’ you been, my handsome young man).
It just amazes me how one of our great American legends would be in so much trouble today if he tried to do what he did in the 60s because of how the copyright laws presently are. We would be living in a world with no Bob Dylan!
The folk tradition seems like a potential example of a nearly complete mismatch between the actual production relations among a group of artists and their fans and the imposed relations of the copyright system. It’s worth asking whether the exclusivities of copyright are getting us more or better folk music.
And while Dylan’s early works may have more directly involved the copying that’s common to the folk tradition, he hasn’t stopped copying entirely in his old age
His 2001 album “Love and Theft” seems to have included a number of passages from a Japanese novel without attribution or license: http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/plagiarbk010.htm
It’s funny, after I posted this I was thinking about where he gets his material today since so much of his earlier work is based on the work of other artists. The whole problem seems to be wrapped up in one sentence in this article, “The songwriter takes a few words, twists them, changes their context, and produces an entirely new work of art”, and whether this is right or wrong. I, for one, still love the man.