On Monday, a federal jury decided unanimously
that pop star Katy Perry and her record label
had, with her song “Dark Horse,” copied a 2009
Christian rap song called “Joyful Noise” released
by an artist named Marcus Gray.
Perry’s lawyer, Christine Lepera, had taken issue
with this line of thinking, saying that “they’re
trying to own basic building blocks of music,
the alphabet of music that should be available
to everyone.”
Legal arguments aside, those basic building
blocks — the “alphabet of music” — are
responsible for producing huge chunks of
the American songbook in ways far more
fundamental than most listeners realize.
The likes of Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones
built their repertoires by plundering traditional
Delta Blues. Bob Dylan made his name remixing
the folk canon in innovative ways; “A Hard Rain’s
Gonna Fall,” for instance, is a direct descendant
of a centuries-old British ballad called “Lord
Randall.” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough
Fair,” with its “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,”
traces back straight through American mountain
folklore to British tradition.
Think you’re familiar with the 1970 Steve Miller
Band classic “The Joker” and its lyrics, “You’re
the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love
your peaches, wanna shake your tree”? North
Carolinian Charlie Poole, one of America’s
seminal early country musicians, recorded a
jaunty song in 1930 called “If the River Was
Whiskey,” which included this line:
“I was born in Alabama, raised in Tennessee,
if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake on
my tree.”