Stan,

Tom Long signed me to ASCAP. A great guy. But no longer in the music business.

Ray, at one time there were many people who sold (or claimed to sell) lyrics, songs, etc. Many changes have been made to the copyright law that legally prohibit it now. But as we all know, not everyone follows the laws.

What I believe you are talking about are called "Catalogue sales." It is where one publishing company (usually a larger one like SONY) would buy out the entire catalogue of another company and include it in their catalogue. SONY did this with TREE publishing in the 90's which was the first big corporate takeover. The bought thousands of songs for around $700 Million dollars. But that included hundreds of huge hits like "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

That has been going on nonstop over the past 30 years. Larger companies buying out small companies, giving lump sums for every thing in their catalogues.

A friend of mine got a Shania Twain cut on a song she had written 12 years before.The original publisher when she wrote the song was a company she wrote for, Balmur publishing which was owned by Canadian artist Anne Murray. Twelve years later, when Shania did her song, she couldn't find where the publishing was. Anne Murray had sold Balmur many years before and as they did tracking, that catalogue had been sold four more times as each successive company came in, bought and sold other companies,
who sold it to other publishers, etc.

They finally found the catalogue had been sold to SONY who owned the ABC television network in LA. The Shania cut was included on the "Desperate Housewives" soundtrack. Owned by ABC which was in turn owned.... by SONY.

In these catalogue sales there may be lyrics, unfinished pieces of songs, disconnected writings, biographies, unfinished demos, etc. They still find things from people like Kristofferson and Willie Nelson.There are probably some lost Hank Williams songs out there. As record keeping in the 50's, 60's, and 70's were pretty shoddy, and people who knew about it died off there is no
telling what is floating around.

The idea of a catalogue sale is just that. You spend a few million on hundreds of pieces of crap in order to find those one or two very valuable copyrights that pay for everything else. In some cases there are songs that were variations of old folk standards or songs that no one quite knows the origin of. They were developed from many sources so no one can really rightly claim ownership. There have been cases of some of these going on to become great hits and the most recent person with the "definable version" gets the credit.

In the case of Marty Robbins, in the 50's and 60's, the publishers had a lot of creative involvement in the writer's careers. So while they might be uncredited at that time, in today's market they would actually be considered co-writers. One of the members of Hank Williams Drifting Cowboys used to say that Fred Rose probably would deserve half credit on some of his big hits. The same with Kristofferson, Harland Howard, and probably Marty Robbins.

It is the same with movies. When they write a script there might be one person credited with it but several people did treatments or drafts. In some things like "Jaws" or other blockbusters, there are several people that are included and bits and pieces from the various treatments go into the final cut. Sometimes the actors even improvise something that works and they are part of it. But they don't nessasarily get writing credit.

Songs can be like that. I have had conversations with some of the "old guard", writers, artists, producers,label people publishers, and there are usually a lot of interesting tales out there. It takes a lot of people to actually build careers. That doesn't take anything away from anyone. Brilliance is brilliance whoever has the responsibility.

MAB