Iconic folk singer/songwriter Tom Paxton has been awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy. J. Freedom du Lac has a nice profile on him in Sunday’s The Washington Post.

On May 17th, 2007, Mr. Paxton graciously spoke at the launch of the Copyright Alliance; he was one of four songwriters there, joining Lamont Dozier, Steve Cropper and Tim O’Brien, Grammy winners all. All four songwriters spoke passionately about the craft of creating music, and about how important copyright was in ensuring they were rewarded for their labor and could take time to write more songs knowing they had that financial security.

Here’s an example from the story of the impact Mr. Paxton’s songs have had over the decades:

Over the past half-century, other artists have recorded plenty of Paxton’s songs — none more frequently than the regretful lover’s farewell, “The Last Thing on My Mind,” which has been recorded by something like 200 artists, from Baez and Judy Collins to Neil Diamond and Charley Pride.

Mr. Paxton has been writing and selling songs for fifty years. It is how he earns his living. Let’s say copyright only ran for 14 or 28 years, as some propose, modeling it after the original copyright law, or 20 years, as some say it should be the same as patents. How would that affect Mr. Paxton? Well, let’s say 30 years after he wrote “The Last Thing on My Mind,” some American Idol winner records the song. That recording artist will earn money on the recording. The artist will not have to share the wealth with Mr. Paxton. (The amount he makes under existing statutory licensing law is in fact obscenely low but I’ll leave that to another discussion.)

Songwriters can’t predict which songs will be hits and which won’t. They might go through a dry spell. They can weather those dry spells if they have a back catalog of compositions that are selling on recordings or if new artists record some of those songs. But imagine a folk singer just getting by (not huge money in folk music for anyone other than Bob Dylan or the late Harry Chapin, who gave half of his earnings to world hunger relief) and seeing recording artists making money off of his work while he doesn’t get paid. When that dry spell hits, that songwriter — by now in their fifties or sixties — might need to find a new line of work for the first time in their lives.

That hardly seems a way to encourage and reward creativity. Would you want to enter an industry set up like that?

Mr. Paxton is one of those rare figures in music who has had an impact on our culture for a lifetime. That is of course exactly what the Grammy Lifetime award is designed to recognize, and obviously they got it right. But Mr. Paxton is one of numerous songwriters I have met who see the direct correlation between their rights as creators and their ability to get paid. For them, the power of copyright as an incentive is not something that is to be debated in law school classrooms; it is as real as the dinner on their table.

How fortunate for society that they can afford to apply their creativity to their craft and thus make all of us beneficiaries.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 12:03 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, creators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.