Deliver Us From Copyrights

Arthur Smith was born in 1921 in Kershaw, South Carolina. His father like practically everyone else in town worked in a cotton mill but by avocation was the director of the town's volunteer brass band. Smith first learned to play a trumpet and credits jazzmen Louis Armstrong, Stephane Grappelli, and Django Reinhart as influences on his early career. In 1945 he wrote and recorded Guitar Boogie, the first instrumental to top the country charts. It also topped the pop and rhythm and blues charts and years later was recorded Chuck Berry who could play a guitar like ringing a bell. It's easy to see the confluence of jazz and country into rock and roll. Like many country entertainers of his era Smith grew up in the rural south in a small town served by a single am radio station that worked feverishly to please a diverse and demanding audience by alternately playing country, rhythm and blues and gospel. Most southerners of that era, both black and white, had very broad tastes in music and could give today's diversity crowd lessons racial harmony. This enabled Ray Charles to not only perform at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem but to appear as a guest on the television show Hee Haw. It enabled B.J.Thomas to tour with James Brown and Elvis Presley to take a single song to top of all three charts which he did twice with Heartbreak Hotel and Don't be Cruel. In 1950 Red Foley topped all three charts with Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.


Smith's contribution to popular music came in a round about way. In 1955 Smith using a tenor four string banjo, instructed bluegrass musician Don Reno to strap on a 5-string banjo, saying, "You just follow me." Monument Records released the result as Feuding Banjos. Supposedly the movie Deliverance made popular the instrumental Dueling Banjos. That is true but it neglects the fact that Warner Brothers flagrantly disregarded Arthur Smith's copyright  and used his Feudin' Banjos without his knowledge or consent. Pursuant to his settlement with Warner Brothers Smith is collecting royalties, know in the music business as "mailbox money"to this day. That's why we have copyright laws but people familiar with the case at the time think that Warner Brothers thought they could just roll over Smith and plagiarize to their hearts' content.


During the SOPA-Protect IP, debate Hollywood and the music industry seemed to argue that the primary purpose of the internet was to serve as a distribution conduit for copyrighted music and films. It's interesting to see how much the movie industry itself abides by copyright law. Now tell me no one at Warner Bothers noticed the similarity to this.