Gretchen Wilson vs. The Black Crowes

[John Macy]

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b148496 ... rssfeeds&u

[Alvin Blaine]

It's "Black Crowes vs. Gretchen Wilson, TNT, and Sony BMG", she's the one getting sued. The Black Crowes are the ones suing, for copyright infringement, so their name should appear before the "vs." not after.
Rolling Stones story on it with YouTube clips of each song.

[P Gleespen]

I don't know. Those verses ARE pretty close.

Then again, "Jealous Again" borrows pretty heavily from the Rolling Stones "Tumbling Dice" which in its self isn't too far off from King Floyd's "Groove Me"...

...maybe this will be just the beginning of a long line of litigation!

[Chris LeDrew]

Wow....note for note verses. It will be fun to watch this one play out.

[Joey Ace]

"FiremanBillyD" wrote this comment in the above article:

And then Chuck Berry sues all Y’all
and gives the proceeds to Willie Dixon,
who promptly gives it back to Robert Johnson,
who in an act of true graciousness, gives it to The Devil,
who invented all this anyway…

It's only rock and roll.

I predict GW will loose, ala George Harrison with "My Sweet Lord'. They'll call it "subconscious plagiarism".
The Crowes lawyers will make money.

Gretchen will buy the rights to the song, so she can pay future penalties to her lawyers.

[Donny Hinson]

Sure sounds like two very similar rock songs to me!

(And I think they BOTH ripped off Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" )

[Jason Odd]

Robert johnson ripped off a heap of material from Skip James and others who dissapeared (for a time) after the 1929 stock market crash made many labels drop their 'race' series in the early 30s.
I guess in 1936, those guys must have seemed like long distant voices from the past, who would have cared about the life of a record the following year, certainly not the labels, and the artists who got paid a pittance were already looking for more songs for their next session, if one ever came.

How many of those early artists (hillybilly and early blues, etc) were actually the first to record songs that had been handed down for years, we'll never know.

[Chris LeDrew]

Donnie nailed it. Good call, man.

[P Gleespen]

Yeah! Donny, great example.


I Wish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKYka-PNt0

Tumbling Dice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sh-fMOecSE

Groove Me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qsFpZ4b47A

Anybody have any more examples of this melody?

It's pretty funny to me that the Black Crowes are accusing ANYone of ripping them off, as they've made a career out of ripping off the Stones and the Small Faces.

[Mark van Allen]

Except for the laywers, this has probably been going on since cave men banging on rocks.
Even a cursory listen to Sylvester Weaver's "Guitar Rag" recorded in 1923 makes one wonder how Leon claimed the melody as his.
From the Wickipedia entry on Weaver: "was covered in the 1930s by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys as Steel Guitar Rag and became a country music standard too."

I don't recall Leon ever calling SGR a "cover". I've always wondered how Sylvester felt...

[Dave Mudgett]

I don't see how "Tumbling Dice" (Rolling Stones, 1972) can be a ripoff of "I Wish" (Stevie Wonder, 1976). I wouldn't argue that King Floyd's "Groove Me" didn't possibly influence both of these, but I don't think they're the same song, unless we want to start ascribing all blues, funk, country, rockabilly, and so on to a small number of early progenitor tunes.

As for the Blacke Crowes alleging that anybody "borrowed" from them, I think this is one of the most flagrant cases of "the pot calling the kettle black" I've heard in a while. You gotta be kidding me.

IMHO, there hasn't been much truly original in popular music for decades. But this should keep some entertainment lawyers in Beemers or Hummers for a while.

My opinions, of course. YMMV blah blah blah ...

[P Gleespen]

I don't see how "Tumbling Dice" (Rolling Stones, 1972) can be a ripoff of "I Wish" (Stevie Wonder, 1976).

You don't? Hello! Starts with a "T" ends with an "E" and it's got an "ime machin" in the middle.

Seriously though, I didn't mean to imply that Stevie ripped off the Stones OR King Floyd. My main point is that that melody line from Ye Olde Blacke Crowes tune "Jealous Againe" (and indeed, pretty much their entire body of work) is so excruciatingly UNoriginal that any accusations of copyright infringement are laughable.

On the other hand, that Gretchen Wilson tune's verse sure does sound a lot like "Jealous Again"...heck even the lyrics are sort of similar.

Even though the Black Crowes ARE a black pot (though I'm sure in reality their pot is a lovely green...bing! ), it doesn't mean that Gretchen is not a black kettle...uh, mmm, um, ahem...if you know what I mean, so to speak.

On an almost completely tangential note, no matter how many times I see the song title "Jealous Again", I can't help but think that they must be doing a Black Flag cover. Is it just me?

[Dave Mudgett]

Even though the Black Crowes ARE a black pot (though I'm sure in reality their pot is a lovely green...bing! Laughing), it doesn't mean that Gretchen is not a black kettle...uh, mmm, um, ahem...if you know what I mean, so to speak.

No question. I guess my point is that people don't have rights to something they didn't create.

But there is, of course, a wide chasm between "truth" and "legal truth". It's all about lawyers, guns, and money. Never, ever try to make any sense of this - it will just leave you shaking your head. IMHO, of course.

[Edward Meisse]

The more I read about this stuff the more I like those old days where people,"Stole," each other's musical, "Intellectual property," with impunity. But appearantly swords always have two edges. If a person doesn't have exclusive rights to h/is/er creation for at least a certain period of time, what's the point in creating it. What'll we do...???

[Gaylon Mathews]

Having worked for G Dub for 4 years and knowing her well, I can say that she never intentionally ripped off anybody. I'm sure the Crowes were the last thing on her mind when they wrote that tune. Knowing her she'll probably go in and change 4 or 5 notes, re-cut the tune and tell them to kiss an a$$! That's just my guess of course.

[Johnne Lee Ables]

Just how many notes are there in the scale???

...or...

As the very erudite Queen Of Soul once put it...

"...Who's zoomin' who..."

JL

[Dave Mudgett]

Just how many notes are there in the scale???

Even for a trivial little ditty like "Happy Birthday", which contains exactly 25 notes - even restricting to the very restrictive 12-tone Western scale, there are 12 possibilities for each note. This gives 12^25 = 953962166440690129601298432 or about 9.5*10[sup]26[/sup] possibilities. Divide by 12 to eliminate the exact same melody shifted to a different key, or about 8*10[sup]25[/sup] distinct melodies. That's about the number of atoms in, very roughly, 5-10 pounds of typical earthly material. That's a lotta 25-note melodies. The number gets astronomically larger for longer ones, and none of this considers rhythmic differences, which can also effectively change a tune.

Of course, most melodies that are combinatorially possible would be very annoying to most human listeners. But there is a vast untapped reservoir of unwritten melodies out there. There are not enough computers in the world right now to enumerate all of these, even if they were all working full time on nothing but that.

IMHO, it also does take a human being to distinguish between melodies that would appeal to a human vs. those that would not. There is a creative aspect to developing really new but still appealing songs.

This is a study in contradictions, to me. I am often amazed how little really new has been developed in popular music in the last several decades. One more piece of evidence from evolution from the apes, to me. So, to a large extent, I agree on the oxymoronic view of "intellectual property" in popular music. That's why I said earlier - lawyers, guns, and money.

PS - I know my numbers are overestimated. For example, there are whole classes of melodies which are so similar that they are virtually indistinguishable. But using a concept similar to the Hamming distance, it is straightforward to set up equivalence classes of melodies that are nearly identical - the distance between them is small. Even then, the number of "unique" melodies - the number of melody equivalence classes - will still be astronomical. If you think this is farfetched, this kind of analysis is going on as we speak. For example, consider some papers by this fellow at McGill - http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications.html - and there are others doing this kind of thing.

I think it would be useful to have a reasonably objective measure of song similarity. Might even free up some entertainment lawyers to find a more useful line of work.

I'll leave you with one more quote - it's on Toussaint's website:

"Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet"

Mark Twain

[Johnne Lee Ables]

This gives 12^25 = 953962166440690129601298432 or about 9.5*10[sup]26[/sup] possibilities.

Yikes, Dave... Ouch...Ow...

I tune and play by ear!

And don't even get me started on taxonomy and music! ; - }

Johnne Lee