We need to examine this disparity.

Skeeter Davis hit the charts with this song in 1962. Herman's Hermits covered it in 1965 and hit the charts, too.

Wait a minute, they changed the music and the lyrics but it's not their song??
That sounds like the hatchet I got from my grandmother. When she gave it to me she said
"This hatchet's a hundred year old, in all that time it's only had one new head and two new handles."

We could do a whole thread about songs about lovers out on the bounding main beginning with "My Bonnie lies over the Ocean."
(Hey, there's a song with a girl's name in the title but is really the Scottish girl singing about her man out on the sea )
>>>When I was a kid, I couldn't figure out what Bonnie was telling lies about.<<<<<

Thanks for pointing us to Alma, I wonder what she's doing now?

Joe(and now....more coffee)Nation

The BBC did a documentary on her in the 90s.

Excellent, Izzy. So many singer disappear.

The name of the tune Bell Bottom Blues is the same but nothing else.


It's not at all like George Harrison lifting the music note for note from "He's so fine" (Carol King) for his hit "My Sweet Lord".

Joe(when I first heard it, I said "What??")Nation

Oh, don't get me started. It seems to me that somewhere about the mid-70s
we started to forget that songs were written by songwriters and sung by singers and sometimes (or most of the time) the singer is not the songwriter. There are important exceptions, but they are exceptions.

I grind my teeth when somebody says Janis Joplin's 'Bobby McGee' as if she wrote it.
Skeeter's "The End of the World"??
I wonder if anyone hearing the Herman's Hermit's version of it has ever heard of Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee??

My guess is CDs are what did it.
On a vinyl album you had plenty of space for liner notes and, under each song they listed who played what on each cut AND who wrote it. Once we started making music in those little boxes there was no room for who wrote what.

And about the same time, the Disc Jockey's voice was silenced on most radio stations. The DJs I went to school with in Boston could tell you ~~without prompting ~~Who recorded a song, when, on what label, who wrote it, what the color of the label was AND everything about the 'B' side.

Anyway, this is the stuff of another thread.

Joe(and now another cup of joe)Nation

Ahaha!

I didn't say it wasn't their song, Slick, i said they stole the idea. It was a light-hearted remark, so sue me.

One could argue that the overwhelming majority of songs were written by men--but until Carol King came along, just how many successful female song writers were there? I thought this thread had been started by Joe (J.J.) Nation. I didn't know it was Torquemada . . .

Get away from me with those thumb-screws ! ! !

who could be anything but light -hearted when talking about popular music. As for theft, as someone said "Any original idea, one that wasn't stolen for somewhere, will be,,,in the next ten minutes."

Joe(cheers)Nation

Pete Seeger once said: "As my father would say in his musicological way, plagiarism is basic to all culture."

I remember watching, usually on Sundays, a tv commercial for a Classical Music Collection. The main push of the ad was that 'you rubes out there already know this music, just by other names.' The guy would play some Brahms lullaby or, more likely, Debussy's Clair de Lune and then say "You see, you've heard this everyday as a lullaby or the music for One Life to Live."

There were a couple more examples of Classical Music being stolen , um, expropriated....er, appearing in different circumstance with a different name.
~~The witness protection program for Beethoven's Fifth.~~

That will $4.99 plus shipping and handling.
You get four magnificent albums containing the most cherished music the world has ever known and you know it already.

Joe(we owned a set of something like them)Nation

There was a Venezuelan guitarist who was famous (mostly in Latin America) in the 1940s and -50s, and Led Zeppelin stole the tune for "Stairway to Heaven" from him. I believe his name was Alirio Diaz.

When Mozart was in Paris, there was a popular song for which he wrote a dozen variations . . . see if you recognize it:

I recognized it, Boss, and here's another variation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTgiBhs3htI

I hear a little Baa Baa Black Sheep but I also hear this:



Joe(sang that song one million times)Nation

Love it, Joe.

I used to sing nursery rhymes to my kids all the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK_wrM8OdGY

The song Rock a Bye Baby in the Tree Top has historical significance, too.

the song refers to events immediately preceding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the overthrow of King James II of England aka James VII of Scotland. The baby is supposed to be the son of James VII and II, who was widely believed to be someone else's child smuggled into the birthing room in order to provide a Catholic heir for James. The "wind" may be the political "wind" or force "blowing" or coming from the Netherlands bringing James' nephew and son-in-law, William III of England, a.k.a. William of Orange, who would eventually depose King James II in the revolution. The "cradle" is the royal House of Stuart.