A SONG THAT WILL LINGER
Kate and I began giving duet concerts in the early 1980s. Everywhere we sang people would ask us if we had any recordings. Requests for a duet recording got more frequent so in 1988 we decided we’d record an album. We didn’t know if we’d ever make another so we chose the repertoire and arrangements we thought might stand the test of time.
The most adamant and persistent request for a recording came from Brian Drabkin, a successful businessman in the lumber industry with a great love for music and a unique sense of humor. We borrowed $2000 from Brian and got to work. We sent cassettes of the finished album to all the record companies we could think of. Nobody responded. We couldn’t even get a “no”. I also sent copies to various festivals and venues as a demo tape, hoping to get hired. Nobody responded.
Kate had an intuition that our album would be released by Rounder. I decided to contact them again. That’s when I found out that Rounder had received the tape and then lost it.
(At the time their policy was to separate submitted cassettes from their labeled boxes and from any paperwork identifying the musicians. They wanted to listen with no preconceptions. But some of the many cassettes they received had nothing written on them. These were never reunited with their boxes and mailing envelopes.
Whoops. Maybe ours was one of these.)
We sent another. This time one of the Rounder owners, Ken Irwin listened to the entire recording in the company of Hazel Dickens. Hazel urged Ken to release the album. Ken had one quibble: he thought the sequence of songs would flow better if the sides were reversed. It turns out we were in agreement. Somehow, some way, he had listened to the second side first and thought it was side one.
Once the recording was released we sent the commercial product to festival promotors and concert presenters. This had artwork and liner notes and photos, and it said “Rounder” on it. This time they responded. The same “talent buyers” who rejected us when we sent them high quality metal cassettes that said “TDK” and which sounded better than the mass produced Rounder product offered us jobs. They said our music had improved. So it was the Rounder name that got us through the door.
Ten years after the album’s release I got a message from Barry Tashian in Nashville. Barry had been Emmy Lou Harris’s harmony singer and rhythm guitarist. He wanted me to know that the trio of Emmy Lou, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt were making a second album and recording one of my songs, “Love Farewell”. Did I have the publishing rights on the song? If I did I would soon be able to buy a house from the royalties that were sure to be rolling in.
Well…. I didn’t compose “Love Farewell”. What I did was piece together pre-existing fragments of words and melody into a coherent whole and add elements of my own to it. And it turned out that the Trio did not record “Love Farewell” after all. They recorded another song from our first album and read the wrong title! They recorded “The Lover’s Return”.
But before I knew that, I contacted the Harry Fox Agency to arrange getting royalties on record sales, and BMI, a performing rights organization that enables song writers and publishers to collect royalties on public performance and radio broadcasts etc.
I found out that a comparison of a recording of “Love Farewell” –as I had assembled it– with a recording of the source material would determine what percentage of my work was original and I would receive that percentage of the standard royalty rate in the future. But first I needed to create a publishing entity and give it a name. And this brings a third song into the story.
The final track on “A Song That Will Linger” is “The Orphan Child”. The last words of the chorus are
Lead them by the hand
‘Till they all reach that glittering strand
which is unremarkable until you hear it backwards.
I had better explain. A young girl we knew had a portable cassette machine, a “Walkman” that had a malfunctioning auto reverse feature. When it reached the end of a cassette side, instead of playing the other side next, it played the same side again but backwards. She let us use her demented machine to listen to a cassette of “A Song That Will Linger”. Some of the rhythms were fascinating. So were some of the words. Now the end of “The Orphan Child” was the beginning. It sounded something like
nnnnnndnnarrts nyaa Nee Roo Da Vetch Ti Boy.
What was that? Vegetiboy? I imagined a juvenile carrot or potato with arms and legs, running around a playground.
So I’m on the phone with the BMI guy who is telling me how to set up a publishing entity to protect my songs (from others claiming to have written them). One thing I will need is a unique name. I should prepare three names as my preferred name may be taken. I said “I don’t think the name I have in mind is taken.” He said “Oh you’d be surprised. It is probably is taken. I’ll have to look it up to check.”
I said “It’s Vegetiboy Music.”
He replied, with excellent musical and comedic timing, “It’s not taken”.