Sampling This Land and Sampling Justice ...
It further turns out, of course, that Woody, himself, had no great devotion to private property rights and, therefore, apparently paid them his highest tribute by filching his famous melody from the Carter Family. You can hear a clip of their tune recorded 10 years before Guthrie used it. Truth to tell, the Carter Family may very well have picked it up from earlier musicians. This is a process known as"sampling" and it is common both in folk musical and rhetorical traditions. I've written about it in the preaching of Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King and Derek Catsam at Rebunk points to a TNR article about an instance of it in African literature.
As I've watched the King Estate become increasingly litigious about its property rights in Dr. King's work, the irony of its folk sampling, freely borrowing from the work of others without attribution, has grown on me. An attorney I spoke with about it said:"Well, it may be a patchwork, but it is his patchwork." Yes, of course, but when sampling is an elemental part of the creative folk process, it seems to me that the application of property law to it is not likely to be very satisfying. One of my favorite examples of the consequences of all this is an inscription on the Civil Rights Memorial at the front of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery:
‘Let justice roll down like waters; and righteousness like a mighty stream.'Of course, King knew that they were the words of the prophet, Amos, several thousand years ago. Subsequent prophets, preachers, and mullahs have repeatedly invoked them and their more biblically literate audiences undoubtedly knew the tradition that gave those words authority. Our superficial popular culture may think that they are authoritative only because Martin Luther King said them.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Click on Civil Rights Memorial Online).