In blues, country blues, why don't songwriters get sued for aping the same progressions/tempos/scales as other established blues songs?

Question

Thought: As a guitar player, you can play the blues in pretty much any scale, A for instance with stock rhythms and endings.

Example: You write a song in that scale you may even use the same solo runs as other more famous blues artists. You release your song on the radio list it with a Performing Rights Organization and no one cries a foul of your blatant usage of chords/performance or solo runs that lift directly off of other more famous artists. But yet if someone in another genre does this, say for example, the ColdPlay vs Joe Satriani/Cat Stevens or even Led Zeppelin in their lifting of riffs and lyrics from old blues folk rile up the copyright demons and cries of plagiarism. Why didn't Cat Stevens sue Joe as well?

Question: Where does the line between what is acceptable to call plagiarism and musical "style" come in to play? I would rather like this to be discussed from a non-financial place and a more creative artist stance without regard to lawyers. Maybe it is just a legal matter I don't understand?

Answer 1

I think there's an element of pragmatism to this. Some people are out for what they can get, but they also have an eye on what they could lose.

Let's say you wrote Stack Exchange Blues, you're collecting royalties from it, and you hear my song Downvotes Got Me Cryin', which you believe steals enough to perhaps warrant a law suit.

Well, you're going to have to consider: do you think Stack Exchange Blues stands up to close examination. Might my lawyer argue that your song is actually a rip-off of something else -- leaving you exposed to the risk of being sued by the owner of that song?

Or might he say "Sure, my client's song has the same chords as Stack Exchange Blues, but that chord sequence is shared by these 100 songs, some dating to Victorian times"?

So, if your song sounds like something else that's unique, you could be accused of plagiarism. If your song sounds like a thousand other songs, you're clear.

Answer 2

To answer the question: "Where does the line between what is acceptable to call plagiarism and musical "style" come in to play?" I have to say that unfortunately, pragmatically, it comes down to what you as a plaintiff can prove in court. It really does come down to the law.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I am not giving any legal advice, which in any case would meet different requirements under the laws of different nations.

The over-simplified answer is that a melody is copyrightable, and a lyric is copyrightable, whereas a chord progression is not copyrightable and the finer points of an arrangement are not copyrightable either.

Anyone can register a copyright on a song or piece of music. If that person believes that someone else has infringed on their copyright, it is up to that copyright holder to sue the other party and to try to prove in court that copyright infringement has occurred. To do so successfully, the copyright holder would have to prove several things, among them that the plaintiff's piece holds a valid copyright that has not expired, that the piece copyrighted was unique, that the defendant had copied the characteristics of the plaintiff's copyrighted piece to a degree that constitutes infringement in the opinion of the judge or jury, and also to prove that the defendent must have heard the plaintiff's copyrighted song before the defendant wrote the song that it is alleged had infringed on the plaintiff's copyright.

If there are indeed hundreds of different copyrighted blues or country songs in the world with the same chord progression and song structure, then a plaintiff cannot successfully prove in court that someone else has infringed on his one copyrighted song with regard to the chord progression and song structure alone. The defendant would successfully argue that they were copying the characteristics of many songs, but not the specific song they were being sued for that day.

In other words, if you assert that you have a copyright, you have to defend it yourself in court with your own lawyers and your own money. The burden is on you to prove that what you have is entirely unique and a specific person has infringed upon the entirely unique characteristics of your property in a distinct way, and that neither you nor the other person got your ideas from anywhere else.

The outcome of this, over many years of court trials all over the world, and reflected in the writing of laws all over the world, including international copyright treaties, is that it is easy to prove that a melody or lyrics are distinct and defendable in court. However, generally, things like a chord progression, a song structure, and a rhythm, all by themselves and not in conjunction with a certain melody or lyrics, are not things that can be asserted in court to be copyrightable. Nobody could win a case with that.

Answer 3

This is an interesting summary of the whole George Harrison My Sweet Lord/He's So Fine plagiarism case, with some discussion of the legal issues involved: http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm

Of course, there are many examples of legal plagiarism of classical tunes. To name three: "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" was taken from the middle of Chopin's "Fantasie Impromptu", the piano lick in Barry Manilow's "Could it Be Magic" is part of Chopin's C Minor prelude, and "Groovy Kind of Love" is nearly identical to the Rondo in Clementi's G Major Sonatina.

Answer 4

Folk, country and blues draw on what is called "the oral tradition". Song "families" have always been part of the oral tradition, and building on -- even re-using -- pre-existing harmonic/melodic structures was/is common practice in those genres. Artists in those genres just kind of "get" that's the case. In the oral tradition, there was no concept of ownership. The idea of ownership is a relatively recent one.

Answer 5

This is a complicated topic, but I think it all boils down to conditioning and what listeners like to hear. There are many ways to harmonize a melody, yet most people use predictable chord progressions because they're easy to follow, work with, and understand.

Jazz is a form of music that is very alienating to non-musicians. I'm certain there are countless people that are not musicians that claim to like jazz, but nonetheless jazz is harder for non musicians to appreciate. Even in the complexities of jazz there are still patterns and a sense of predictability, but their harmonies are more complex and thus may be harder for people to enjoy.

Chord progressions such as the I IV V and ii V I are commonly used because people like to hear them. We could harmonize the tunes that use these progressions in countless ways, but then we have to worry about how much dissonance we introduce. I think that the use of chord progressions are pretty much out of the realm of being considered plagiarism.

I think it is plagiarism when a melody is almost a complete copy of another melody. I have heard countless songs that are rip off's yet they are not considered plagiarism. Take Sublime's "What I got" vs. The Beatles "Lady Madonna". Obviously The Beatles are better and Sublime's song is not good, but nonetheless there are glaring similarities in the melody.

Inevitably two composers will arrive at similar or perhaps even the same melodies. Plagiarism fights usually go on when a composer feels that the other person listened to their song before composing the accused work. There are standards and even generic riffs that seem like they're free for the public to use. Such as blues progressions, bass riffs, etc. Again, main melodies are usually the tipping point for plagiarism.

Answer 6

There are law-based answers to this question, but the laws about music had to be constructed around the preexisting musical culture. Ultimately the reason you don't get sued for copying a chord progression probably has to be explained in terms of the reasons why chord progressions are not considered as unique and individualistic as melodies. Here are three such reasons:

(1) A chord progression is more arguably a form, while a melody is more arguably a composition. If someone asks you to explain the sonata form or the 12-bar blues form, you're not going to be able to explain it without explaining how the chords create the foundation of the form.

(2) There are theoretically infinitely many possible chord progressions, just as there are infinitely many melodies. But in reality chord progressions aren't really as varied. For example, some huge number of musical compositions consist of I-V-I-V-I-V-I... In a harmony course, they teach you certain rules about harmonic progression, and those rules aren't really prescriptions but descriptions of things that composers in the past seem to have done, because they worked well. There are infinitely many other things you can do with chords, but they generally don't work as well.

(3) Chord progressions can be blurred by various chord substitutions, added tones, suspensions, etc. A jazz musician might recognize a certain piano accompaniment as being based on the chords of "I Got Rhythm" or "Giant Steps," but to the average person, or even to a professional musician who's not a jazz musician, there might be no resemblance at all. (I had a harmony teacher once who ridiculed a jazz musician's claim that the notes D, G, and B could be a voicing of a C chord...with the root and third omitted and an added M7 and 9.)

Answer 7

For blues specifically :

A good percentage of blues follows the same chord progression (good ol' 12-bar) and a LOT follow very similar paths with melody, riffs, bridges, and lyrics.

Why don't they all sue each other ?

The problem would be identifying who did it first. The 12-bar progression is thought to have eminated from African slave/chain gangs, meaning there's no single "owner" and the blues style of singing gives rise to a lot of similar melodies meaning it's hard to identify who 'invented' it - if any one person ever did.

As for lyrics .. Who woke up earliest this morning ...

This doens't apply to other genres so much (eg Coldplay vs Satriani) because they're not so much following a traditional way of making a tune (blues); they're coming up with their own traits and so I guess it's easier to identify one tune from another, and easier to stake a claim on a particular sequence of melody etc.

This makes it sound like I'm saying "all blues sounds the same" - I'm not because a lot goes into the feel of the song of course, but essentially 12 bar blues is one chord sequence served up in a zillion songs, and no-one knows who did it first.

Answer 8

To answer the OP question of 'In blues, country blues, why don't songwriters get sued for aping the same progressions/tempos/scales as other established blues songs?'

Progressions, tempos and scales are tools to use to express a musical thought that we all use. The melody and combination of chords with rhythmic patterns are the work of these tools and therefore a creation of the author.

Answer 9

I think DougusMaximus came the closest to the real answer. Being a rock musician (and especially for guitar players), just about the first "whole song" chord progression one learns is the "12 bar blues". Written by... well, no one. There is no copyright or ownership on it, because it has been around for so long, no one knows who to give first credit to it for, and basically anyone/everyone is able to use it whenever they feel like it. Now if you start deviating from the "standard" 12 bar blues chord progression, and you deviate enough, and your deviation is exactly like someone else's deviation, then there MIGHT be a problem. But generally, in blues/rock/country or any genre of music really, if it sounds exactly like or close to the standard 12 bar blues progression (look that up to see what the actual chords are), then there will not be a problem. From a music composition standpoint - obviously lyrics become a whole other matter.

Answer 10

I'm a blues guitarist/singer and I think that suing someone for plagiarism on a melody I might have come up with in a song is somewhat pointless. First of all when I play the 12 bar chord progression say in the key of A, then I can use most notes in the pentatonic scale in that same key to solo over it or construct a melody line for the lyrics.

My point is : who am I to deny another artist the use of the same notes that I do over a similar 12 bar blues in the same key? There is no way I could claim any of those notes as uniquely mine since they simply belong to that specific scale and anyone is free to use them in any order they see fit.

To me the music is a vehicle to get the story of the song across, to support and underline the emotion of it and the only thing I feel could be subject to copyrights would be the actual lyrics that tell that story.

I feel that almost anything you can come up with ( in blues as well as any other style of music) has been pretty much done before many times over in one form or another. This whole copyright madness is all about 1 thing only: money.. nothing else.

If I were to sue someone for publishing a song that very closely resembles one of mine and demanded part of the money he/she earned with it, well that would as stupid as suing my neighbour for doing the same daytime job as I do, using the same tools, driving more or less the same pickup and wearing the same work clothes and demand they pay me part of their earnings for copying my way of generating income.

Someone like SRV played a lot of other peoples songs, played 'em in his own unique way but always acknowledged the original artists and never claimed their songs to be his own. And by doing so gained a lot of respect and still made some decent cash. Put the love of music before the money, after all that's what it should really be about.