Who Owns a Folk Song?

When collectors began writing down rural songs in the nineteenth century, they believed they were rescuing something that belonged to everybody and to nobody. [A] The songs had no named author, varied from village to village, and survived only because they were sung. [B] Printing them seemed a pure act of preservation. [C] Yet the moment a version was written down, one performance out of many became the version, and the collector's name appeared on the page. [D]

The legal consequence came later and was not intended. Copyright protects a particular arrangement, not a tune in the abstract, so the printed setting could be owned even though the melody could not. A singer who had learned a song from an aunt could find that performing it in a concert hall required permission from a publisher whose claim rested on a manuscript made by a stranger with a notebook.

Defenders of the collectors point out that without the notebooks most of this music would have disappeared, which is true and does not settle the question. The difficulty is that the act of preserving a tradition alters what it preserves: it fixes a single form, transfers authority from singers to editors, and creates property where there had been none. Recognizing that is not an argument against collecting. It is an argument for being honest about what a collection is.