Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and our colleagues at All Of It are back with another annual installment of WNYC's Public Song Project, now in its fourth year. Do you know about this? Each year, All Of It has been inviting musicians to incorporate works of art that have entered the public domain into new compositions and new recordings. This year, with a twist, a new partner, and a timely bonus prompt.

Joining us now to share more about the project and how they are hoping that musicians, maybe including you, even if you're not a professional musician, will participate, is Simon Close, one of the All Of It with Alison Stewart producers. Hey, Simon.

Simon Close: Hey, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Remind people what is the public domain and what works of music or literature are in it.

Simon Close: The public domain, in short, is this conceptual legal place that captures anything not protected by copyright. To go a little bit deeper into that, when you make a song or a book or any creative work, it gets a copyright in the United States. That means nobody else can copy it or share it or cover it, or adapt it without getting your permission or paying a royalty.

After a certain amount of time under the law, those copyrights expire, and then that book or that song or whatever it is that you made is free game for anybody to adapt or share or do what they want with. What I love about that idea of the public domain is that it creates this commons for anybody to take a piece of art and put their own voice into and engage with the history of that art, or just use it as inspiration to come up with something new.

Brian Lehrer: You have brought us some of the songs that have entered the public domain this year. Meaning that our listeners are free to play with these songs and do their own little versions of them without having to pay royalties. We'll go through a few to offer listeners some inspiration. You brought us a clip-- actually, to look back a little bit from one of last year's winners. Who are we about to hear from?

Simon Close: This winner is a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter named Raleigh Boo. Maybe we'll play it first, and we can talk about it afterwards. This is a song called Sparks Fly and it's inspired by the story of John Henry.

[MUSIC - Raleigh Boo: Sparks Fly]

Brian Lehrer: That's a song that entered the public domain last year?

Simon Close: No. The John Henry, this was a song that was inspired by the folktale of John Henry, which is not really anything that-- I think at any point was really captured by copyright because there's this other category of like folk songs and folk tales that just exist in the public consciousness and therefore are also in the public domain. The story behind that song is that Ra was one of the winners of last year's competition. He said that his mother used to tell him that story when he was growing up.

When I interviewed him about it, he said that he was inspired by the theme of perseverance in the John Henry story. John Henry was a formerly enslaved African American folk hero who builds a railroad faster than the machine can build it. It's a story of perseverance, and that's what Ra was inspired by. Ra also told me that he was inspired to record that song in the first place, partly for the project, but also because he has a daughter of his own. He wanted to share this story of perseverance that his mother passed down to him and pass it down to his daughter as well.

Brian Lehrer: That one was always in the public domain. Every year, a new crop of musical compositions and recordings enter the public domain, like we said. This year's got some songs that a lot of listeners might be very familiar with. Here's a 1930 recording of Georgia on My Mind, now in the public domain, by Hoagy Carmichael.

[MUSIC - Hoagy Carmichael: Georgia on My Mind]

Brian Lehrer: Pretty good sound quality for 1930. Maybe the most famous cover of that one was by Ray Charles in the '60s. What might people do with that for the public song project?

Simon Close: Because that was published in 1930, the composition is now in the public domain. You can cover it, you can adapt it, you can mash it up with another public domain song. You can take it, and you can mess with the lyrics somehow, or you can mess with the melody. What I'll mention is that when Ray Charles recorded that, he had to pay royalties for it because it was still copyrighted at that point. Now that it's in the public domain, you can do what Ray Charles did, but you can do it for free.

Brian Lehrer: Simon, I see you're teaming up this year with something called the Internet Archive. What's that?

Simon Close: The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library that was founded in 1996. It turns 30 this year. The listeners will probably know the Internet Archive best for various projects that they do. They're behind the Wayback Machine, which is website that you might go to sometimes to find other articles from the past or websites that have been taken down, don't exist anymore wherever they originally existed.

The Internet Archive's mission is to preserve this web history, which is more ephemeral than sometimes we think of it, and also make all the information that gets put on the web public and free, and accessible to everybody. This is the piece of the project this year that I'm really most excited about because it's our first-ever partnership for the contest. The Internet Archive are going to be helping to share material that's in the public domain and spread the word about this project. The really big thing is that every year, as part of this project, we pick a few winners.

Besides the winners, we put all of the submissions that we get into a playlist that's on WNYC's website. If you follow the rules and send in a song that uses the public domain, you're guaranteed to be part of this playlist. In the past, it's only been on WNYC's website, but this year, it will also be entered into the Internet Archive, which is this database that gets like a million and a half visitors every day.

Brian Lehrer: Cool.

Simon Close: Your song will get out to more people and be enshrined into this space that is an institution that's made to hold this kind of thing.

Brian Lehrer: You brought one more little music clip for some inspiration. You want to set this up for us? It's Marian Anderson singing Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. You want to tell us a little bit first why you brought this?

Simon Close: Sure. This is Marian Anderson, the contralto, singing Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. Probably everyone recognizes that song. What's different about this from the other songs we've played is that the sound recording specifically is in the public domain. For various legalese reasons that I'm not a lawyer and would be too long to get into on the air, sound recordings are treated a little bit differently from compositions.

A composition is like the sheet music for a song, but the sound recording is the specific performance and recording. Sound recordings from 1925, so not 1930, but 1925, just entered the public domain this year, and this is one of them. What you can do with this sound recording or any sound recording from 1925 or earlier is actually sample the songs of Marian Anderson, like the sounds of this recording. You can remix them, or you can put that sample into your song, however else you want to build around it.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Marian Anderson.

[MUSIC - Marian Anderson: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen]

Brian Lehrer: All right, before you go, Micah-- that was so great, by the way. You've got a bonus prompt tied to the-- Simon, I said, Micah, thinking about the other guy who's been on this morning.

Simon Close: It's an honor to be confused with Micah Loewinger.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] You've got a bonus prompt tied to the 250th anniversary of the United States, which is this year. What's that?

Simon Close: Yes. Not only is 2026 the 30th anniversary of the Internet Archive, who we're working with, but obviously, anyone who tuned into the State of the Union this week or is paying attention to arts programming at all this year will know that it's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It also happens to be the 50th anniversary of the Copyright Act of 1976. All you need to know about that is it's the foundation of how modern copyright and the public domain works.

Leading up to this year's project, I was thinking about these anniversaries, and I was also thinking about the ways that people like Raleigh Boo, the winner whose song that we heard earlier, have used this project to share their own stories, even stories that are tied up in history and identity. I always love to get those submissions and learn the story of the submitter behind them. I was also honestly thinking about the kinds of stories we tell and the ways that we're seeing certain stories and identities being removed from official records of American identity and history.

This year, I added this bonus prompt that's totally optional. You can take it or leave it. That's the beauty of the public domain. You can just send a song based on the public domain, whatever you want. If you want to take some inspiration from this prompt, I'd like people to think about the way that the public domain is a free archive and a free tool that's open to anyone and everybody. It's a way to engage with history critically or in celebration, either way, and also add your voice and identity to the historical record. Your submission doesn't need to be a huge statement along those lines.

It could be, or it can be like a small and personal thing, like Raleigh Boo's submission. The Marian Anderson song is a good example of that. You can draw for an American spiritual to talk about the stories that are and aren't told in American history. There's another. Yes, Georgia On My Mind is another great example. That's the official state song of Georgia. There's definitely something you can do with that to reflect on whatever you want, American history. There are more examples and more information on the website.

Brian Lehrer: WNYC's Public Song Project, led by Simon Close and the other people at All Of It. What's the web address? People should go for more, and if they want to consider participating.

Simon Close: That's wnyc.org/publicsongproject.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, Simon.

Simon Close: Thanks, Brian.

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