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Power Line pays birthday tribute to Sam Cooke, who pioneered in "bringing the gospel style into mainstream pop music" before his strange and early death in 1964.
Cooke followed in the trail of soul music that Ray Charles was blazing at Atlantic Records. Cooke's pop fare is lightweight compared to Charles's; none of his pop music quite measures up to Charles's "I Believe to My Soul," for example, though it doesn't get much better than "Good Times," "Soothe Me," and "Bring It On Home to Me."
With his posthumous "A Change Is Gonna Come," he contributed a song that matched the moment to perfection and that continues to resonate today. Long after his death, with the 1985 release of his live recording at the Harlem Square club in Miami, listeners could hear the gritty, soulful intensity that he had mostly withheld from his pop releases. The point here: The creative amalgamation of art and commerce. Both the artists and their record label backers were moved by a need to go commercial, to modify traditional styles to reach out to new audiences. And they succeeded, to their own beneft, both artistically and financially, and to that of the audiences.
Furthermore, IP rights did not then, and would not now, inhibit such creative adaptation of a style to a new context. Most of what you hear mourning the expansion of IP rights or the shrinkage of the public domain is unsupported by any factual analysis, and is, in fact, blather.
posted by James DeLong @ 8:29 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation
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