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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. This hour, we're revisiting the Public Song Project, our listener-generated songbook based on work in the public domain. First, we'll hear from our winners, and then we'll run through some more of our favorite submissions with a little bonus material thrown in. Later, we'll also hear from Duke law professor Jennifer Jenkins about the public domain and why copyright laws matter for our culture. Let's get this started.

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You may have noticed that copyright law has been in the news pretty often this month, especially with regard to music and art for a few different reasons. After decades of legal purgatory because of sample usage, the hip-hop group De La Soul's catalog landed on streaming platforms at the beginning of March. Their story is a reminder of how copyright can both protect creators and on the other hand, make existing work less accessible and in danger of being lost. More recently with the rise in popularity and complexity of AI programs like ChatGPT, the US Copyright Office suggested that AI art itself couldn't be copyrighted, but a work of art that builds on AI could be, or at least, the parts that were made by a human could be.

The point is copyright is an important story right now and an essential one for creators. It's also one that we've been exploring since the beginning of the year through the Public Song Project. If you're new to the project we launched in January, here are the basic points. We invited anyone to create and send in their own song recording based on work in the public domain. It could be based on music, books, movies, poetry, or something else. The source work just had to be in the public domain, meaning that it wasn't protected by copyright or that its copyright had expired under US law if it was published before 1928.

At the beginning of March, we revealed the winning submissions and shared some of the 80-plus original recordings that were sent in, but we realized some listeners might have missed it the first time around, and given all the news about music and copyright recently, we wanted to revisit the project. To start us off, we're going to hear my conversation with our first winner, Kat Lewis. Kat's public song submission was a re-imagining of the song I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream, which entered the public domain this year. Here's our interview.

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Alison Stewart: Kat Lewis, welcome to All Of It, and congratulations.

Kat Lewis: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship with music.

Kat Lewis: Well, I've been playing music since I was a kid. I grew up in a musical family, and that's what I love to do, sing songs and play music.

Alison Stewart: Once you heard about the project, you decided to cover the song, I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream. Tell me a little bit about that song and why you gravitated towards it.

Kat Lewis: When I heard you mention it on the show, it immediately caught my attention. It's just a song that we all know and love, but we only know the hook. I looked at the list of songs that you had put together and I just kept coming back to I Scream, You Scream because it's so catchy, but I hadn't heard the whole song. I listened to the whole original song and it needed some new lyrics. It was time for an updated version.

Alison Stewart: Let's just say the lyrics are needing of an update. I think you put it well. [laughs]

Kat Lewis: Yes.

Alison Stewart: In your piece, there's a lot of environmental sound. In the recordings in your production, we hear kids' voices and animal noises. Two of our judges actually said they really were drawn to that, loved the background noises and the street tone is how someone put it. What are some of the sounds we're going to hear on this track?

Kat Lewis: There are some ice cream trucks. Where I used to live, there would be two ice cream trucks that parked on the same block and played their songs. It was a chaotic, trippy experience to hear their songs. There's a little of that. Then there's a fire hydrant that was open during the summer where kids of all ages would play and keep cool. When a car drives by an open hydrant, it makes a particular sound. I included that as a sound of summer.

Alison Stewart: Anything else you'd like to add before we play your song?

Kat Lewis: Ice cream trucks are really difficult to operate and maintain, and so I think it's a good time to celebrate these heroes of summer.

Alison Stewart: Kat Lewis is one of our winners for the Public Song Project. Kat, thank you so much for working on this, sending in a song, and joining us today.

Kat Lewis: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Here's I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream performed by Kat Lewis.

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Alison Stewart: That was a new version of the 1927 tune I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream performed by Kat Lewis, one of the winners of our Public Song Project. Next up, we have our next winner Alice Lee, and her cover of the Prisoner's Song, first published around 1924. Alice, welcome and congratulations.

Alice: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship with music.

Alice: Okay, I started out as a singer-songwriter in the New York scene about 20 years ago, actually. I was playing a lot of gigs then. Then I took a break and I was in Guatemala for about 10 years. Over there, I was performing a lot of live music, more interpretations than originals. Then I moved back here about five years ago, and here I am.

Alison Stewart: What motivated you to take part in the Public Song Project?

Alice: I'm a regular listener to WNYC, so when I'm home, I have it on in the background. I'm always listening to the shows. When the announcement came out, I heard it and it piqued my interest.

Alison Stewart: What song did you choose and why?

Alice: I chose the Prisoner's Song by Vernon Dalhart. That was interesting to me because I didn't really know it that well, but when I had a listen it did seem familiar to me. It was the first country song to sell more than a million records, which surprised me, I did a little research, and has been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, and Louis Armstrong.

Alison Stewart: Now, the song uses banjo, but also a very modern-sounding production. What inspired the soundscape?

Alice: It was very much like a kitchen sink spaghetti effect. I had a couple recordings I took on my phone. One was of a weird noise in New York street subway. Another was of church bells on 9th Street in Brooklyn. Then I borrowed a banjo from the Central Library in Brooklyn. I did an arpeggiated figure and a couple of harmonies. I was very inspired by James Blake, so I did that as [unintelligible 00:08:30] Then the banjo and the vocal harmonies go throughout, it's the core of the track. Then I threw it into Garage Band and just tried, auditioned a bunch of different loops over it, and just went with what sounded good. I did a lot of editing as well on those tracks so that I didn't use them as is, but I wound up manipulating a lot of those as well.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything else you would like listeners to know about the piece before we play it? Any part of it you particularly want people to pay attention to?

Alice: I felt like it spoke to these times. I think the reason why I really chose that song as well is because I was singing it from a woman's point of view, 100 years later, and you hear of things happening today where women might be imprisoned for nothing, for being a woman. What happened to Mahsa Amini in Iran spoke to me. I just extrapolated what would happen if it was a woman in the present times.

Alison Stewart: Alice Lee is one of our winners for the Public Song Project. Alice, thank you so much for joining us and for sending in a song and taking so much time, and bringing so much of New York into your song.

Alice: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Here's the Prisoner's Song performed by Alice Lee.

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Alison Stewart: That was a new version of the 1924 tune the Prisoner's Song performed by Alice Lee, recorded and submitted for the Public Song Project. We have two more performers to talk about their submission. For their song, sisters Chloe and Lily Holgate created a musical setting for the Edna Saint Vincent Millay poem Afternoon on a Hill. Chloe and Lily, welcome and congratulations.

Lily: Thank you so much.

Chloe: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Chloe, tell me a little bit about your musical partnership with your sister.

Chloe: Oh, we've been singing together our whole lives. We also played violin and piano together growing up, but the pandemic gave us this amazing fresh start to really devote a lot of time which we had to finally collaborating musically and finding our voice compositionally which we had never done before. We started just making arrangements of things, and then we used poetry as a jumping-off point to write music.

Alison Stewart: Lily, what works about the partnership with your sister?

Lily: Well, I guess since we have the same background and we've been collaborating in some form since we were little kids, we understand each other musically, we have similar aesthetics, and I think we're able to really have fun together. Granted there are always the challenges because we're sisters, we're very close, we're very sensitive to each other's moods, but for the most part, I think we have a great time and we're able to align our aesthetics and make music that we both really like.

Alison Stewart: Chloe, what led you to the poetry of Enda Saint Vincent Millay and this specific poem Afternoon on a Hill to turn into a song?

Chloe: We have always loved Millay's poetry. We visited her house. This specific poem I've known for many years, I've sung other settings of it, but it's very simple yet the imagery it evokes is really powerful, and it's almost an affirmation that you can say to yourself in the winter months. It's like the speaker is saying something beautiful that they will do in the future. It's very transportive which just brought up so much musical harmonic imagery to us. It lent itself really well to being set to music and to adding background vocals that, hopefully, will take you to a meditative space of imagining that you're one with nature.

Alison Stewart: Lily, one of the judges described your song this way, "Haunting vocals, dream-like, and captivating." How did you land on your soundscape?

Lily: Well, that's such a nice thing to hear that they said. Well, for me, I was envisioning-- One of the lines in the song is, watch the wind bow down the grass, and the grass rise. That undulating, just grass going up and down and catching the light, I wanted to create something that had a rocking feel. I just came up with a chord progression and plucked it out on my violin. I wanted it to just ebb and flow and feel really warm as well like you're baking in the sound.

Alison Stewart: Chloe, anything else you want our listeners to know about before we play it?

Chloe: Well, we go by Sibyl Music which is spelled, S-I-B-Y-L. Do find us online and, hopefully, follow more poem settings because this is, hopefully, going to lead us to an album of more female poets set to music.

Alison Stewart: Cloe and Lily Holgate perform as Sibyl. Their song Afternoon on a Hill was one of our judges' top picks for the Public Song Project. Thank you so much for doing this and for being with you. Let's take a listen.

Lily: Thank you.

Chloe: Thanks.

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Alison Stewart: That was Afternoon on a Hill based on the Edna Saint Vincent Millay poem of the same name performed by Chloe and Lily Holgate who perform as Sibyl for the Public Song Project. Stick around and you'll hear more highlights from the 80+ songs you receive, plus our judges Lincoln Center chief artistic officer Shanta Thake, New Standards host, Paul Cavalconte, and DJ Rehka. We'll talk about how they helped pick these winners. This is All Of It. [music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, and you are listening to Uke Uh Lady Rhapsodie, one of the many, many songs we received for the public song project. We are revisiting our public song winners and runners up on today's show. Because we were on a tighter clock when we first aired these, you'll get to hear longer cuts of these great submissions this time around like that song we just played, which was sent in by submitter Crugie.

It's an unlikely mash up of Rachmaninoff samples and lyrics from the 1925 tune Ukelele Lady. You can listen to them all by going to wnyc.org/publicsongproject, where we've put up a playlist with the full versions of all the songs. There was a wide range of submissions. Some public song players took a straight forward basic cover approach. A few even performed just acapella like Elsa O'Reilly who sang After You've Gone.

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Alison Stewart: On the other hand, there were plenty of lush and layered pieces like Can't Help Loving that Man performed by Ashleigh Prather and Manish Ayachit.

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Alison Stewart: There was everything in between like these two guitar pieces. First a musical setting of the William Carlos Williams poem Peace on Earth. This is by Catsy.

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Alison Stewart: Then Mal Petty's version of the folk song Wayfaring Stranger.

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Alison Stewart: We sifted through all these songs with the help of our judging panel which included some in-house assistance from John Schaefer and Caryn Havlik of New Sounds as well as New Standards host, Paul Cavalconte. We'll be hearing some more songs in a bit, but right now, I'd like to bring Paul in to talk about his experience with the project.

Paul, thanks for making time.

Paul: Thank you for having me. New Standards is on WNYC 8:00 to 11:00 PM on Saturday evenings, and one of our tag lines is a 'century of great songs and then some.' When I heard about this project, I thought this is really up my alley, especially because the show is anchored in the American Songbook era, which is the great Broadway tunes is sort of bookended by Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building. Then there's all this other music that has come since then, like singer-songwriter that is built the same way. Then looking back, there are older songs that are ripe for rediscovery, especially these that have now come into the public domain.

The song that really caught my ear was this song, which is a folk song called Erie Canal, which is done by a couple of artists, Karen Whitman and Rick Pantell. What I liked about it is that first of all, they're using found art in making it because they actually got a section of rail for an old railroad for the clang. They've got other percussive sounds, actually an ink disc on top of a jobbing press that they rotated and made into a percussion instrument, so that aspect of it is cool as is the way they produced it.

It reminds me of one of the great revival records of another time, Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean. It's got this space, and it's got an environment that invites you in sonically and it's a tune that I remember from singing in public school in the Bronx. They use to have an assembly and teach us these old songs. They'd pass out mimeograph sheets, they smell great by the way, and we would sing along. I found myself singing along with this.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a bit of the Erie Canal by Karen Whitman and Rick Pantell.

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Alison Stewart: Paul, thanks for your help with the project.

Paul: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: A lot of submissions reimagine their source material, writing new lyrics or new arrangements for many different reasons. Here's a creative one from Victor V. Gurbo of Irving Berlin's A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.

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Alison Stewart: Some players drew inspiration from personal experiences and current events for their new versions. Musician Rachael Ritt said she remembered being displaced after Hurricane Sandy when she recorded her cover of Bessie Smith's Backwater Blues. Diane Perry told us her moving version of Ol' Man River was inspired by a tragic photo from the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande. Here's a bit of it.

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Alison Stewart: It was also interesting to see how many public domain works popped up more than once. For instance, we received three versions of Best Things in Life are Free, and four different versions of Puttin' on the Ritz. We got two major rewrites of the song I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Scream. We heard Kat Lewis's in the last segment. Here's some of Jordan Cooper's rendition titled We All Scream.

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Alison Stewart: On top of the songs that appeared more than once, we somehow also had two separate ukulele groups send in songs, so kudos to both the NYC Uke Squad and the Chatham United Methodist Church Ukulele Orchestra. Our Public Song player sent in two submissions based on the poetry of AA Milne and two based on Edna St. Vincent Millay. There was a lot more poetry and book-inspired work where that came from. Here's Todd Henkin's song based on the Langston Hughes poem The Weary Blues.

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Alison Stewart: Among our judges' favorite poetry adaptations was one based on the poem Young Witches by Marian Tannhauser. Masa Gibson wrote and sent in a musical setting for it using a pandemic project collection of glass bottles.

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Alison Stewart: That song was highlighted as a favorite by one of our judges, Lincoln Center chief artistic officer Shanta Thake, who happens to be on Zoom right now. Shanta, thank you for being with us.

Shanta: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Given how busy you are, what made you say yes to helping us out with this Public Song Project?

Shanta: Oh, I loved this project. I thought so many-- It's always so incredible to be inspired by songs and creators from over 100 years ago. The idea that these stories have something to teach us now, that these poems and fragments of what was some part of culture making at the time actually can be brought into today's context so seamlessly in many cases.

Alison Stewart: What surprised you in what you heard?

Shanta: What I loved was how many amateur creators and people that really dug through, we think of as the crate diggers of the DJ set that were really finding these poems and thinking about what was the best setting, including the one we just heard, where it's this beautiful simple poem about witches, about a spell being cast, and to set that to music, but then to set it within this framework of a glass bottle collection, [laughs] and just to put all of those pieces together. Basically, somebody who I would think of as an artist and citizen who actually doesn't consider themselves to be a professional musician in any context, but I think really in this case, did such a beautiful job of pulling all of these things together.

Alison Stewart: Shanta, you gave high marks to a track from Shahab Zargari called Sonification Pontification. It was a remix based on NASA recordings and the sound of a jet trip, and you wrote, "I just love this use of unexpected sounds to create this new palette. Somehow this feels like it collapses time." What inspired that reaction?

Shanta: Well, I think it's first of all, when you hear this clip, you hear these throwback sounds to what I assume some of the first airplane travel. It has this very nostalgic feel to it, but then it has all of these beats added, and then the sound of what I'm being told is the sound of a black hole, [laughs] which I've never spent so much time with, [laughs] but this idea of taking this nostalgic sounds and voices and then putting it in the context of us right now exploring space and where we are now versus where we are then when this recording was made, and it really does feel like we're exploring this together. You're side by side with these folks on this plane journey. I just love that about it.

Alison Stewart: Shanta Thake is Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center. Thank you so much for taking the time to be part of this.

Shanta: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit of Sonification pontification.

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There were a few Public Song Project submissions like that one that didn't use vocals. Instead, some creators used samples and recorded instrumentals. From that ladder group, we got one very jazzy rendition of Irving Berlin's Blue Skies. It was sent in by Jared Walzer. Here's a bit of it.

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We had so many great judges help us out. Charlie Harding, Nate Sloan, Lara Downs, Jennifer Jenkins, Corey Doctoral, and Marika Hughes. We're going to hear from one more as we wrap up this segment. DJ Rekha is a New York-based musician and founder of the Beloved Series Basement Bhangra, and they were a public song judge and a guest on this show once upon a time. Hi, Rekha.

Rekha: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm great. Why did you want to join the Public Song project?

Rekha: Oh, I love judging things. [laughs] I'm just kidding. I was excited to hear what people would do. Pardon my voice, it's a little hoarse. I always love to see what people are doing. As Shanta said, I'm an eternal crate digger. Give me a pile of things unknown, and I want to hear what people have done with it.

Alison Stewart: What struck you about the songs you listened to?

Rekha: Some of them, as you said, were dead on covers. I think I was gravitated towards things that were reinterpretation. They used multiple sources that I could tell were a little bit crafted, but sounded simple. I love the ice cream song that opened the segment with a lot and Rhapsodie too. I don't know, I was just looking for something fun. It's also hard to, the songs that we-- we've heard some of these songs in different iterations. When I stopped putting on the Ritz, I thought of Paco-

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Rekha: -which was a funny thing. Even with the ice cream song, I think of Wutang, when I think of ice cream. It was all a lot of fun to listen to.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's really fun when a song you know it, and you know it in one variation, but when somebody creates something entirely different out of it, it's interesting to have that yin yang of, "I know the song, but this isn't that song. I know, but I like it."

Rekha: Yes, yes definitely. That's always interesting to me.

Alison Stewart: Now, you gave a near-perfect score to the song We're going to go out on. It also happens to be a song that helped kicked off the whole project because it just entered the public domain this year, The Best Things in Life are Free, performed and mixed by Alan and Alita Goffinski. What did you like about this tune?

Rekha: Oh, they went in on their theme so hard. It was like an A-plus paper, and then some cited the Quran, they took the theme of the moon. Again, this is something that is deceptively sounding simple, but there's a lot of craft in it. I really appreciated that.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen. DJ Rekha, thank you so much.

Rekha: Thank you.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to our public song Project Recap. We first revealed these songs earlier this month, but decided they were too good not to revisit. We want to thank all our judges again, and everyone who submitted a song to the Public Song Project, which was organized and curated by AOI producer Simon Close and Zack Gottehrer-Cohen Cohen. To hear the songs all in full, go to wnyc.org/publicsongproject. That's wnyc.org/publicsongproject. Up next to cap off our public domain hour, we'll hear from Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University Center for the study of the public domain.

 

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