I'm your fire at your desire, my Susannah
Feb. 10th, 2013 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOK, I'm slow.
Back in the early days of Readers' Poll (1987) I'd asked, "Who wrote 'Hey Joe'?," and listed some of the pretenders/contenders. And in the late '90s in my early Internet days I did a bit of searching on that topic, then let it sit. Then last August the thought flapped its way towards me, "I'll bet that the Wild World Web has this question answered by now, if it's answerable." Went to Wikip, and indeed the answer is there (usual caveat about not believing everything one reads on the Web). It's not our old buddy Trad, despite what Tim Rose claimed in the credits to his version. Is not Dino Valenti either. Is Billy Roberts, the guy credited by Jimi Hendrix (though Hendrix' version is based on the Tim Rose variation); song was probably written sometime in the mid to late 1950s, possibly with the help of Scottish folk singer Len Partridge. Copyright was registered in the U.S. in 1962.
Except there's more to it than that. Wikip: "Roberts possibly drew inspiration for 'Hey Joe' from three earlier works: his girlfriend Niela Miller's 1955 song 'Baby, Please Don't Go To Town' (which uses a similar chord progression based on the circle of fifths); Carl Smith's 1953 US country hit 'Hey Joe!' (written by Boudleaux Bryant), which shared the title and the 'question and answer' format; and the early 20th century traditional ballad 'Little Sadie,' which tells of a man on the run after he has shot his wife. The lyrics to 'Little Sadie' often locate the events in Thomasville, North Carolina and Jericho (near Hollywood, South Carolina). Roberts was himself born in South Carolina."
Well, first, Carl Smith's "Hey Joe" doesn't have anything in common with Billy's except for the title and that the main character is talking to Joe (on account of wanting to steal his girl). Pace Wikip, there’s no question and answer and no back and forth. As for the venerable Trad's "Little Sadie," other than that it takes place in the Carolinas, and Roberts is from a Carolina, I don’t see why "Little Sadie" should take precedence over "Tom Dooley," "John Hardy," and presumably a shitload of others as songs about/narrated by killers that include an attempted getaway.
But regarding Niela Miller's "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town," take that "possibly" and turn it into a "definitely," assuming Wikip is right about her song coming prior to "Hey Joe"*: Billy Roberts lifted the chords and the q&a format from her. ("Baby, whatcha gonna do in town? Baby whatcha gonna do in town? I'm gonna sit in the barroom my feet tucked in/Drinkin' all the beer and whiskey and gin.") She should have been in the writing credits. Period. Whether this was legally required (you can't copyright a chord pattern), it was a moral obligation. But I don't know Roberts' circumstances, and he does seem to have committed an act of kindness towards Dino Valenti later on (Wikip: "other sources (including singer Pat Craig) claim that Roberts assigned the rights to the song to his friend Valenti while Valenti was in jail, in order to give him some income upon release"), so not for me to be self-righteous from a distance. And Billy's song is better, and the song wouldn't have hit as big without the murder he added; and anyway its hitting big ten years later was like winning the lottery, was due to the Byrds performing it live and the Leaves and Love etc. hitching onto it and doing better with it than the Byrds eventually did, and Tim Rose picking it up somewhere along the way, and Chas Chandler visiting the U.S. and hearing Rose do it and getting Hendrix to record his own version, which is when the big, wide lettuce really started floating down from the sky (again, caveat: the story of Chandler hearing Rose is merely something I read somewhere, I forgot where; sorry for all the hedging and qualifying, but the T-ara brouhaha is reminding me to distrust unattributed stories — and to distrust many attributed ones, for that matter). Rose follows the Leaves in starting with the gun and condensing two of Roberts’ verses into one, making the song more direct and effective. And the Hendrix version credits Roberts. So without Tim Rose, no minor bonanza for Billy, even if Tim denied him a couple of pennies by waving his hand at Trad instead.
The Wikipedia article, by the way, implies by innuendo ("see also the article on 'Morning Dew' regarding Rose and song copyrights") that Tim Rose had a questionable relationship with copyright, the writeup for "Morning Dew" making a case that Rose had little right to add his name to the credits for doing a rearrangement of Fred Neil's rearrangement of Bonnie Dobson's "Morning Dew" and copying Neil in re-ordering the words in one of the lines. But there's another side to Rose and copyrights, coming up.
Meanwhile, speaking of people named Neil, we now arrive at the actual topic of this post, which is that Neil Young's Americana album last year with Crazy Horse is a pisser. He takes a bunch of songs from the American songbook, in some cases simply jettisoning the melody and inserting his own, going wide, sloppy, and long in his guitar playing, just as you want when Neil hops aboard the crazy horse. Seems to toss in new lyrics, or at least unfamiliar ones — says he was frequently disinterring original words and restoring suppressed verses. In "Oh Susannah," he fortunately allows a couple of verses to remain suppressed (so the racism is left out); he does add a spelling lesson, and makes the melody a raving rock 'n' roller with no apparent relationship to the original, sounding much better than if he'd stuck with the Stephen Foster ditty.
But as I said, I'm slow.
Here's Neil Young & Crazy Horse:
I'd like to say that there was something classically familiar to me about the melody, and that that's one of the reasons I'd responded so well. In truth, though, I hadn't noticed anything familiar, except in the general way it hit the button that said "raving rock 'n' roller." Only through the efforts of citizens of the Great Nation of YouTube was I able to hear the melody's resemblance to this beloved (by me) mid '80s MTV hit:
Which of course was a cover of this even better hit from 1969:
But that's not where our story begins.
What took me to the Great You of Tubes was this song credit on NY & CH's Americana: "Stephen Collins Foster; Arrangement: Tim Rose." Yes. TIM ROSE. I quickly typed "tim rose oh susannah" into a search box, and the rest was revealed from there, dated 1962:
Note that, though the trio claims to be big, one member is far bigger than the other two.
So it's Rose who added the spelling lesson, and to my ears created a whole new song, mostly new words, merely referencing Stephen Foster. And then got his work ripped off in the Netherlands. According to Wikip, Rose and crew never contested the copyright to the Shocking Blue song. Perhaps Tim had too much respect for the folk process.
As for Neil Young, he takes Rose's melody whole and keeps Roses' refrain (incl. the spelling lesson) but basically goes back to Foster's words. Of course, it's fun watching people in YouTube comment threads accuse Neil Young of ripping off Shocking Blue.
------
*Miller didn't record her song until 1962, same year that Billy Roberts copyrighted his. And, assuming it isn't an imposter, here she is on a comment thread, still pissed-off.
http://heyjoeversions.wordpress.com/more-about-billy-roberts
Back in the early days of Readers' Poll (1987) I'd asked, "Who wrote 'Hey Joe'?," and listed some of the pretenders/contenders. And in the late '90s in my early Internet days I did a bit of searching on that topic, then let it sit. Then last August the thought flapped its way towards me, "I'll bet that the Wild World Web has this question answered by now, if it's answerable." Went to Wikip, and indeed the answer is there (usual caveat about not believing everything one reads on the Web). It's not our old buddy Trad, despite what Tim Rose claimed in the credits to his version. Is not Dino Valenti either. Is Billy Roberts, the guy credited by Jimi Hendrix (though Hendrix' version is based on the Tim Rose variation); song was probably written sometime in the mid to late 1950s, possibly with the help of Scottish folk singer Len Partridge. Copyright was registered in the U.S. in 1962.
Except there's more to it than that. Wikip: "Roberts possibly drew inspiration for 'Hey Joe' from three earlier works: his girlfriend Niela Miller's 1955 song 'Baby, Please Don't Go To Town' (which uses a similar chord progression based on the circle of fifths); Carl Smith's 1953 US country hit 'Hey Joe!' (written by Boudleaux Bryant), which shared the title and the 'question and answer' format; and the early 20th century traditional ballad 'Little Sadie,' which tells of a man on the run after he has shot his wife. The lyrics to 'Little Sadie' often locate the events in Thomasville, North Carolina and Jericho (near Hollywood, South Carolina). Roberts was himself born in South Carolina."
Well, first, Carl Smith's "Hey Joe" doesn't have anything in common with Billy's except for the title and that the main character is talking to Joe (on account of wanting to steal his girl). Pace Wikip, there’s no question and answer and no back and forth. As for the venerable Trad's "Little Sadie," other than that it takes place in the Carolinas, and Roberts is from a Carolina, I don’t see why "Little Sadie" should take precedence over "Tom Dooley," "John Hardy," and presumably a shitload of others as songs about/narrated by killers that include an attempted getaway.
But regarding Niela Miller's "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town," take that "possibly" and turn it into a "definitely," assuming Wikip is right about her song coming prior to "Hey Joe"*: Billy Roberts lifted the chords and the q&a format from her. ("Baby, whatcha gonna do in town? Baby whatcha gonna do in town? I'm gonna sit in the barroom my feet tucked in/Drinkin' all the beer and whiskey and gin.") She should have been in the writing credits. Period. Whether this was legally required (you can't copyright a chord pattern), it was a moral obligation. But I don't know Roberts' circumstances, and he does seem to have committed an act of kindness towards Dino Valenti later on (Wikip: "other sources (including singer Pat Craig) claim that Roberts assigned the rights to the song to his friend Valenti while Valenti was in jail, in order to give him some income upon release"), so not for me to be self-righteous from a distance. And Billy's song is better, and the song wouldn't have hit as big without the murder he added; and anyway its hitting big ten years later was like winning the lottery, was due to the Byrds performing it live and the Leaves and Love etc. hitching onto it and doing better with it than the Byrds eventually did, and Tim Rose picking it up somewhere along the way, and Chas Chandler visiting the U.S. and hearing Rose do it and getting Hendrix to record his own version, which is when the big, wide lettuce really started floating down from the sky (again, caveat: the story of Chandler hearing Rose is merely something I read somewhere, I forgot where; sorry for all the hedging and qualifying, but the T-ara brouhaha is reminding me to distrust unattributed stories — and to distrust many attributed ones, for that matter). Rose follows the Leaves in starting with the gun and condensing two of Roberts’ verses into one, making the song more direct and effective. And the Hendrix version credits Roberts. So without Tim Rose, no minor bonanza for Billy, even if Tim denied him a couple of pennies by waving his hand at Trad instead.
The Wikipedia article, by the way, implies by innuendo ("see also the article on 'Morning Dew' regarding Rose and song copyrights") that Tim Rose had a questionable relationship with copyright, the writeup for "Morning Dew" making a case that Rose had little right to add his name to the credits for doing a rearrangement of Fred Neil's rearrangement of Bonnie Dobson's "Morning Dew" and copying Neil in re-ordering the words in one of the lines. But there's another side to Rose and copyrights, coming up.
Meanwhile, speaking of people named Neil, we now arrive at the actual topic of this post, which is that Neil Young's Americana album last year with Crazy Horse is a pisser. He takes a bunch of songs from the American songbook, in some cases simply jettisoning the melody and inserting his own, going wide, sloppy, and long in his guitar playing, just as you want when Neil hops aboard the crazy horse. Seems to toss in new lyrics, or at least unfamiliar ones — says he was frequently disinterring original words and restoring suppressed verses. In "Oh Susannah," he fortunately allows a couple of verses to remain suppressed (so the racism is left out); he does add a spelling lesson, and makes the melody a raving rock 'n' roller with no apparent relationship to the original, sounding much better than if he'd stuck with the Stephen Foster ditty.
But as I said, I'm slow.
Here's Neil Young & Crazy Horse:
I'd like to say that there was something classically familiar to me about the melody, and that that's one of the reasons I'd responded so well. In truth, though, I hadn't noticed anything familiar, except in the general way it hit the button that said "raving rock 'n' roller." Only through the efforts of citizens of the Great Nation of YouTube was I able to hear the melody's resemblance to this beloved (by me) mid '80s MTV hit:
Which of course was a cover of this even better hit from 1969:
But that's not where our story begins.
What took me to the Great You of Tubes was this song credit on NY & CH's Americana: "Stephen Collins Foster; Arrangement: Tim Rose." Yes. TIM ROSE. I quickly typed "tim rose oh susannah" into a search box, and the rest was revealed from there, dated 1962:
Note that, though the trio claims to be big, one member is far bigger than the other two.
So it's Rose who added the spelling lesson, and to my ears created a whole new song, mostly new words, merely referencing Stephen Foster. And then got his work ripped off in the Netherlands. According to Wikip, Rose and crew never contested the copyright to the Shocking Blue song. Perhaps Tim had too much respect for the folk process.
As for Neil Young, he takes Rose's melody whole and keeps Roses' refrain (incl. the spelling lesson) but basically goes back to Foster's words. Of course, it's fun watching people in YouTube comment threads accuse Neil Young of ripping off Shocking Blue.
------
*Miller didn't record her song until 1962, same year that Billy Roberts copyrighted his. And, assuming it isn't an imposter, here she is on a comment thread, still pissed-off.
http://heyjoeversions.wordpress.com/more-about-billy-roberts
no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 10:13 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1CE0L0YTs0
You can hear 30 seconds of Niela Miller's version here (track 7):
http://www.numerogroup.com/products/niela-miller-songs-of-leaving
And we talked about Niela Miller back in Rolling Country 2009 (a discussion I'd totally forgotten), Chuck being the only one to have actually heard "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town."
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=412667&boardid=41&threadid=68321
no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 11:16 am (UTC)Speaking of slowness
Date: 2020-04-06 06:16 am (UTC)Nazareth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opxGE9fMauY