Comments on: Lady Antebellum Spoofs Aldean; Free Dirt Daubers Download; Merle Haggard Records Baseball Song

By: Gator

Gator — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:50:04 +0000

Thank God for Gretchen Peters!

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 23:22:56 +0000

Mindy Smith is part of tonight’s Music City Roots show along with such well known(?) acts as Sugar and the Hi-Lows (sounds like a diabetic situation to me), Smokey’s Farmland Band (sounds like someone is still burning their fields after the harvest), Billy Falcon (wouldn’t Billy Thunderbird have sounded more impressive?), Peter Bradley Adams (sounds like there should be a III after that), and Peter Cooper is the guest host.
Link: http://www.musiccityroots.com/

Dirt Daubers? Legendary Shack Shakers? I have to hand it to J.D. Wilkes, he sure doesn’t bother with boring or predictable band names! (lol)

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:31:13 +0000

I think it can be okay if it’s done by the right people (Brian Wilson finishing a couple George Gershwin songs last year being an example).

You think Brian Wilson has special psychic powers that allowed him to commune with the spirit of George Gershwin? It’s not a bad idea because person X is or isn’t involved, it’s a bad idea because the dead “co-writer” can’t make any further contribution, nor respond to the contributions of the “co-writer.”

The closest accepted practice is the setting of poetry or other lyric content to music after the fact (like, oh, the Fugs’ settings of poems by William Blake and A. C. Swinburne), but in those cases the poems were completed and published, and the relationship is clear – the poet wrote, the composer composed after the fact. These abominations don’t even have the virtue of that clarity; there’s no sign that Williams was *satisfied* with what he’d written, and no indication as to what kind of music he thought might go with what he’d written once he was. And therefore, calling it “finishing” – whether it’s Dylan with Williams or Wilson with Gershwin – is misleading.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:24:23 +0000

Oh, and by the way, I counted a dozen or more errors in a quick read of Paul Dennis’s Osborne Brothers piece.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:17:08 +0000

I think it can be okay if it’s done by the right people (Brian Wilson finishing a couple George Gershwin songs last year being an example). I just don’t think Bob Dylan and Jack White are the right people. I would feel a lot better about the project if Hank Jr. was directly involved.

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:07:24 +0000

Yeah, I thought the “investigative” aspect of the SavingCountry item was pretty lame. And I’m not sure whether calling the issue raised by handing out a dead man’s lyric scribbles to a bunch of “co-writers” is properly called “ethical.” On the other hand, there pretty clearly *is* an issue of some sort, at least to me, and I find the practice, even where the motives are presumed to be admirable, to be pretty, I dunno, icky. You can’t write a song with a dead man, all you can do is exploit (<- carefully chosen word) what he's left behind.

By: Barry Mazor

Barry Mazor — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:39:10 +0000

Saving Country could have done some more recent homework than that–as in: ask those involved about this. There was, btw, and always is, a difference between legal possession of sheets of paper with words on it and ownership of the lyrics for USE themselves. This happens over and over, as when someone has, say, an old demo record of someone show a sunder contract, and imagines it means they can pout out the record. Always–not.

The authenticity of the lyrics is not even in question. And you can see images of a lot of the originals in the Colin Escott/Kira Florita book “Hank Williams: Snapshots from the Lost Highway” which as published back in 2001.