<snip>
A poetic form is as much an invention as Volta's battery or Franklin's
electricity. It is a concrete object which comes out from given times and
motivations. The literary forms are more important even of their authors.
[Erminia P]
what I was thinking of was something like a hypothetical poet, lets call her
Sheila Ramsbottom, from Oldham, who say has never showed her poems to
anyone, but they are brilliant [David B]
most of Elvis' early songs were ripped off without payment from black rural
singers [David B]
<snip>
In the days of the first Harry Corbett, Ramsbottom was a snake and one of
Sooty's™ little chums. Or did I dream this?
Whilst I broadly agree with Erminia that literary forms are more important
than are individual authors, I'm also (along with others) wary of defining
with too much certainty what those forms actually are or of building up too
rigid a model of influence and intertextuality.
David's parable is misleading. Where Erminia seems to be commodifying poetry
at a genre level, David leaves the former entirely undefined. Nor does he
characterise cultural transmission; merely property and theft:
commodification at a more general level. Though property _is_ theft, in some
contexts, as when unowned knowledge is _claimed_: the patenting of neem, for
example. Why not, instead of *poems*, an improvement on the mousetrap or
some newly branded beans?
The Presley reference also seems tendentious. It didn't all start with
Arthur Crudup, pace (as it were) Erminia. Three songs were used, I think:
*That's All Right*; *My Baby Left Me* and *So Glad You're Mine*. And Crudup,
some lines of whose *That's All Right* may go back to B L Jefferson (though
I doubt if it started with _him_ either) had been defrauded of his royalties
(by Bluebird?) long before. Nor is it simply a matter of White stealing from
Black (or vice versa). That merely colour codes a view about class
antagonisms. Indeed most of the broad brush binaries one might have wished
to use about the various traditions that had nurtured early Presley ('white'
v 'black', 'urban' v 'rural', 'traditional'/'oral' v 'composed'/'written'
etc - from, say, the 1920s up to 1954) probably break down. Material was
newly created but also drawn from Victorian songsheets, hymnbooks, popular
songs, the recordings of other singers (black and white) and so forth. It
was credited variously to 'anon', 'traditional', or to individual artists
(though not necessarily the right ones) recording either under their own
names, under pseudonyms, or (for example, where a musician worked in
different genres) under heteronyms; Crudup, for example, also recorded as
Elmer James (sic). And material was regularly stolen, swapped, intermingled
or otherwise interfered with. So 'early Presley' was, in my view, part of a
tradition, albeit nearing its end, not its antithesis.
(There are similarities, BTW, between Presley's voice production and, say,
that of Robert Johnson, whom he certainly wouldn't have heard. On the other
hand, when Johnson sings 'Ooh well' in falsetto he is, almost certainly,
imitating Peetie Wheetstraw...)
Which is, I suspect, far more than anyone wanted to know.
Christopher Walker
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