Over the past several weeks I have kept coming back to an
episode of The Voice (which I was not
watching by choice) in which one of the contestants performed the standard
“Georgia on My Mind.” The arrangement of
course slavishly copied the arrangement of Ray Charles’s classic 1960 recording,
minus the strings and choir. What struck
me, though, was when I heard Adam Levine – I think – refer to Ray Charles’s
recording as the “original” version. First
on my mind was the matter of the appalling ignorance of music history on
display here: Ray Charles did not write the song, nor was it written for
him. Instead, by the time he recorded
the song it was already 30 years old and had been recorded a large number of
times. The song had in fact been written
by Hoagy Carmichael, prominent songwriter and pianist (along with Stuart
Gorrell, his non-songwriter friend who collaborated on this one effort). As far
as I know, the earliest version of the song was recorded by Hoagy himself. Certainly, Ray Charles’s recording has
become the definitive version – as
witnessed by the up-and-comer’s slavish copying. But original
is something else.
This led me to a much more fundamental question, far more
important than who was first: What does it even mean for something to be
“original”? When Levine calls Ray
Charles’s version the “original,” it does not mean simply the first one to be
recorded. It means something more. When we say that the Beatles did the original
version of “Come Together,” we do not mean simply that they recorded it first;
when we say that Aerosmith covered it, we do not mean to suggest simply that
they recorded it later. They were not covering
simply the song, the notes on a page; they were covering the performance. Thus, to say that the Beatles did the original
version of “Come Together” is to say that the entire conception of the song,
embracing both composition and interpretation in performance, is
theirs. And as I have suggested, this notion of originality would not have been
recognized by Hoagy Carmichael.
Carmichael was a professional songwriter in a time when professional
songwriters wrote songs performed by singers and dance bands. In many cases, the performer (not an “artist”)
was essentially anonymous, the individual recording secondary; it was the song
that mattered. This is a leftover of
sorts from an era (up to the 1910s) when songs were sold and promoted primarily
not through recorded sound but through sheet music. The song was the thing. (This conception of originality, of composer
as auteur, is familiar to us from
classical music. There, the score is
everything; the performer’s possibilities for innovations fall within a much
narrower range.)
In fact, in the first half of the twentieth century, the
very idea of an “original version” and a “cover” was problematic, or at least
carried a different meaning than it does now.
Different record companies would put out competing versions of a song –
or even a single company might put out multiple versions, one to take advantage
of each market – pop, “race”, “hillbilly”, etc.
And none of these was “original” in the sense that Levine meant it.
This emphasis on composition, and of the composer of auteur,
was not the only one operable at the time, however. It is on the contrary in direct opposition to
that found in jazz. Except for the
earliest forms of jazz (specifically, New Orleans jazz, with its structured
polyphony), most jazz music is centered on the idea of improvisation. Jazz has in fact had a series of notable
composers – first Jelly Roll Morton, later Duke Ellington, later still
Thelonious Monk – but these figures were marginal to the development of the
music itself; they were not the most widely influential musicians (as
emphasized by Gunther Schuller in Early
Jazz.) Instead, in a sense the true
“composers” of jazz have been the most admired performers: Louis Armstrong,
Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, etc. And
for the most part, they were not composers in the traditional sense, as their
music was composed of improvisations on current or standard pop songs, or
blues; to the extent that they wrote songs, these were largely improvisations
themselves. In fact, from the late 1920s
and especially the 1930s, improvisation in jazz increasingly meant mostly
discarding the melody, the song itself, and simply improvising on a song’s
chord changes. In this mode of
originality, all originality lies with the performer and the performance; the
song itself is irrelevant, or at least secondary. Paradoxically, this conception – like the
opposing one I discussed above – again leads to a lack of concern with the
“original” version of a song.
The combination of composer as auteur and performer as
auteur was achieved in rock music in the 1960s – notably, as “rock ‘n’ roll” became
“rock”. At that time, in that genre, the
idea of the rock band as a self-contained composing and recording unit,
following the innovative trail of the Beatles, became predominant, at least in
the minds of serious rock fans. To some
extent, this explains the criticism of a supposedly fake band like the Monkees,
but this line of criticism was a new one, or even anachronistic or different
from what we might expect. I imagine it
must have revolved specifically around the “artificial” origins of the group
(assembled through a casting call for a TV show) and the fact that they faked
playing their own instruments on the show.
The fact that they didn’t play their own instruments – only on record as
opposed to on tour, only for the most part, and primarily on their early
singles and albums – was not unusual at the time. Session musicians were often hired for this
task in the music industry, even for more critically acclaimed or respected “rock”
bands. I am reminded especially of Roger
McGuinn, guitarist and vocalist from the Byrds, who appeared in the “Rock &
Roll” miniseries (produced by the BBC and NOVA/WGBH in 1995) talking about the
fact that “Mr. Tambourine Man” shared its rhythm with the Beach Boys’ “Don’t
Worry Baby” – because the drums on both were played by session drummer
extraordinaire Hal Blaine. “Mr.
Tambourine Man,” moreover – a song written by Bob Dylan! Of course, a good portion of the Byrds’ career
was made covering the work of Bob Dylan (or covering Pete Seeger cover
Ecclesiastes in “Turn! Turn! Turn!”).
On the one hand, the conception of originality as both composition and interpretation in performance was not simply invented by the
Beatles; it existed previously in popular music, if intermittently. Take, say, Ray Charles himself, with songs such
as “I’ve Got a Woman” embracing both conceptions – but even here, the idea of
“originality” is problematic since the music and arrangement of “I’ve Got a
Woman” were largely an adaptation of the 1954 gospel recording of “It Must Be
Jesus” by the Southern Tones. Ray
Charles’s career on Atlantic Records in the 1950s was filled with such
borrowings from gospel songs. And, as it
happens, Charles’s three #1 pop hits were covers of a then 30-year-old Hoagy
Carmichael song, a Percy Mayfield demo, and the country tune “I Can’t Stop
Loving You.”
On the other hand, the notion of the composer and not
performer as auteur has never disappeared, but has continued in rock and
especially in other forms of popular music, as witnessed by the longevity of
various songwriters and songwriting teams: from Bacharach and David and
Holland-Dozier-Holland, through Ashford and Simpson and Gamble and Huff, to Stock-Aitken-Waterman
and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and on and on.
Of course, many of these songwriting teams doubled as producers, and so
were involved in fashioning more or less all aspects of their artists’
sounds. Thus in recent decades we see
the emergence of the idea of producer
as auteur – an idea that has become even more prominent with the rise of sampling,
mashups, and electronic music. And this
in turn has introduced yet another conception of originality and authorship
into popular music. While the idea of
originality lying with the composer or performer reflects a romantic or
modernist notion of the artist as auteur, the newer mode is a postmodern
one. Instead of ideas being borrowed, we
have recorded sound copied verbatim; instead of homages or covers, the reuse of
previously existing material – essentially found sound – now repurposed.
Yet the other modes of originality persist, particularly the
concept of a song as a combination of composition and performance. I think we often take for granted this
concept of originality, of authorship. We
have internalized it to the point where it seems natural, perhaps the only one
thinkable. But the naturalness of this concept is simply
an illusion. Not only are different ways
of viewing originality and authorship possible, but alternate ways have been
and continue to be operative in our culture, even within just our music. Different modes have existed over time; at
the same time in different genres; and competing within a single genre. By reminding ourselves of this fact, we open
up worlds of possibility in creating music, in reusing it – or in the simple
joy of listening.
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