![]() ![]() House of the Rising Sunīob Dylan failed to copyright his arrangement of House of the Rising Sun. As the folk singer Pete Seeger noted, the night it debuted, it was a clever rearrangement of the traditional anti-slavery song, No More Auction Block. The tune itself, of course, was never Dylan’s. Dylan might have been sued himself over the song had he not wisely dropped its fourth verse, a straight lift from Joe Hayes and Jack Rhodes’s A Satisfied Mind, a song owned by the notoriously litigious Porter Wagoner. Surprisingly, when the Newsweek story was published, Dylan did not sue, but it would take Wyatt until 1974 to come clean. When asked where he got it from, Wyatt claimed to have written it. Wyatt played it to his band in October 1962, nine whole months before Peter, Paul and Mary made it a hit. Like Shakespeare before him, the first time Bob Dylan achieved public notoriety was as a “thief of thoughts” in an October 1963 Newsweek feature that suggested there was a “rumour circulating that Dylan did not write Blowin’ in the Wind, that it was written by a Millburn high-school student named Lorre Wyatt, who sold it to the singer … Wyatt denies authorship, but several Millburn students claim they heard the song from Wyatt before Dylan ever sang it.”ĭylan’s naive decision to publish the song in a folkzine, Broadside, a full year before he released it gave Wyatt the opportunity to claim it for his own. His claim was roundly dismissed, the New York federal judge branding him “unworthy of belief”. He even took the pair to court when Elvis covered it, having previously signed a release renouncing all claims to the song in exchange for $750. Later, we learned that Johnny Otis put his name on the song as a composer and indicated to Don Robey, the label owner, that he, Johnny, had power of attorney to sign for us as well.” Otis insisted to his dying day he rewrote the words, which originally “had lyrics about knives and scars, all negative stereotypes”. As Stoller later told their biographer: “The reality of the cold-blooded music business was something else. ![]() The culprit was producer Johnny Otis, to whom Leiber and Stoller had contracted their songs in the hope of breaking into the industry. No sooner had they written it, in 1952, than it was copyrighted to Don Robey, who owned Peacock Records, and Big Mama Thornton, who recorded it. Hound Dog provided Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with a crash-course in R&B publishing. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features Jerry Leiber with Elvis Presley and Mike Stoller. he has taken advantage of some unprotected material … a greed for false reputation.” Handy’s printed retort was that at least he “had vision enough to copyright and publish all the music I wrote, so I don’t have to go around saying I made up this piece and that piece in such and such a year … Nobody has swiped anything from me.” 2. As for the music, jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton fired the first salvo at Handy’s lilywhite reputation in a 1938 Downbeat article, suggesting: “Mr Handy cannot prove anything is music that he has created. In fact, the lyrics were little more than a clever composite of stray couplets heard in the clubs of Memphis and the streets of St Louis. WC Handy’s most famous, and lucrative, song was once the second most valuable copyright in popular song, but even he admitted that “the 12-bar, three-line form … with its three-chord basic harmonic structure was already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted class”.
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