MAKING A
SONG AND
DANCE OF   
IT!

I have been including recommendations for music number in my pantomime scripts for quite some time, but now, no longer. Often the search was quite laborious, and there’s no guarantee that groups using my scripts will follow the recommendations anyway.

From an early age, I was spoon-fed jazz. My father was a great fan, and he had a considerable collection of 78 rpm records. As my teens started, so did the rock ‘n’ roll era, with 45 rpm discs. In October 1962, we heard… “Love, love me do… “Beatlemania"! As my late brother used to say… “We had the best… and now they’ve got the rest”.

What dire dross is being doled out today. How can they yell like that when nobody’s hitting them with a cricket bat?

So… I am writing new lyrics for what one could call ‘traditional’ songs, and also for popular tunes in the ‘public domain’, which means they must meet at least one of the following criteria:

·                    All rights have expired.

·                    The authors have explicitly put the work into the public domain.

·                    There never were copyrights.

In general terms, in the U.K., a song is in the public domain if the publication date is before 1925, if the song has no composer, or if it is a ‘folk’ song. Some music publishers have available pre 1925 songs which have been ‘arranged’ by someone since then, and therefore are copyright. It’s a bit of a minefield, so tread carefully.

If a piece of music does not fall within public domain and is under copyright, then it is unlawful to reproduce, perform, distribute, or create a new version of that music without a proper license under many countries jurisdictions.

Useful information is available on the following websites, where hundreds of songs are listed… enough to keep you going for quite some time!

www.pdinfo.com

rockytopconcert.weebly.co/public domain songs.html

Also, on – monologues.co.uk – you will find hundreds of song lyrics which have been put together, over a 12 year period, by a small group of and music hall enthusiasts. Most of the songs would have been popular between the years 1860 – 1920, and each one has the date of publication listed.

There is also a collection of 100 printable PDF music sheets.

One bee that gets in my bonnet is… if I do a Google search for a lyric, the stateside search engine asks… “Did you mean lyrics for… “No I didn’t, Yank!