Generosity... or not?

I'm working on some new stories and songs for my repertoire. One story is a variation of the Nasreddin/Nasr-ed-din Khoja story called "The Loan of a Cauldron" which you can find here and also in collections of Yiddish fairy tales such as Isaac Bashevis Singer's When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw ("Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Mizer"). My version features a seamstress who is frustrated over her repeated attempts to get the rich mayor of her town to pay her for the bright green coat with brass buttons the seamstress made for him. The seamstress outwits the mayor and ends up doing quite well for herself.

This brings me to a small quandry. In earlier days, I would have happily shared my version of the story in its entirety on this blog. However, once something is posted on a blog, it's considered to be published without the author legitimately being able to claim a publishing credit. I discovered this paradox after a magazine expressed interest in my "Children's Books That Never Were" series, but didn't want anything that I had already posted on Saints and Spinners. By the time I'd heard from the magazine, I felt I'd already shared my best pieces with the 30+ people who regularly read my blog.

With all of the folktales and folksongs I perform, very little of it is actually my intellectual property. I'm starting to feel more protective of the originally pieces I create plus the public domain folktales that I've made "my own," as it were. I encourage audience members to share the stories they've heard and liked, and everything on this blog is published under a Creative Commons License. The chances that someone is going to appropriate one of my works for his or her own is slim, and the likelihood that my works would make me wildly successful is even slimmer... so why am I feeling so protective of my creative output? This is not a rhetorical question. If you have some perspectives you'd like to share, I'd like to read them in the comments or your own blog posts.

Song of the Week: Freight Train

Somewhere in the early 1980's, family friends took me to hear Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten in concert. She was in her nineties, and at the end of the concert, four generations of her family stood on stage with her. What I remember most about the concert was Cotten explaining why she played the guitar upside-down. She was left-handed, and completely self-taught. As a result, her finger-picking style was unlike anyone else's, as you can see in this video for "Freight Train," a song she wrote when she was twelve years old. You can read more about Cotten's life story, including how she was discovered by Pete and Peggy Seeger, the copyright issues involving "Freight Train" (I still don't get it how anyone can get away with copyrighting a song s/he didn't compose) and more in this article by L.L. Demerle called Remembering Elizabeth Cotten. You can listen to Cotten play "Freight Train" and watch her finger-picking style here:



Here are the chords:



For those of you who struggle with holding down two or more strings with one finger, remember these F chord alternatives.

I'll admit that I appreciate Cotten's creaky, sometimes off-key voice in small quantities. As with Bob Dylan's music, it's the song-writing and guitar-playing for which I keep coming back. Cotten's first album for Smithsonian Folkways, Freight Train and Other Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes, is a good album with which to to start. The production values are pretty good, and I enjoy hearing the squeaks of the guitar-strings. There's also Shake Sugaree which has the title track sung by Brenda Evans, Cotten's great-granddaughter (12 years old at the time of recording), and the Grammy award-winning Live!

At the Elizabeth Mitchell concert last Saturday, Mitchell and her band (including her young daughter Storey) lead "Freight Train" and had us call out different places to travel to by train. We went from Pittsburgh to Mars. You may listen to a sample by following the Mitchell link, then clicking on "Flower" followed by "Listen."

Make the law happy

Today's Unshelved comic strip rings a particularly sonorous bell with grownups who work with children.

Disney (TM) can just deal with it

Video: Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright

I wasn't able to watch the entire 10 minute film through because the spliced clips of different characters explaining copyright laws and fair use policies made my teeth rattle in my skull. Still, I'm passing along the article and link to you because copyright, fair use and public domain issues are important to me. You've probably noticed that I stretch the "fair use" clause quite a bit for my children's book parodies. My blog has a Creative Commons license, too. As long as you're not making a profit off of my work (though really, someone should), you're welcome to use the items knocking around in my virtual treasure-chest of stories and songs.