Asheville Music Lessons

By now, if you’ve visited this site before you know that much of the song that I’m familiar with comes in the form of Church hymns. Which, can be completely seperate in style from the classical piano traditions of my College music lessons… But anyway, the topic of copyright is something that I had to pay close attention to in making the CD and as I’m looking at ideas for what to do next I’m thumbing through an old gospel hymnal that my Mom had saved. It’s simply titled “Victory” and was published by “The Trie Music Company” and although the title page lists no copyright, I’ve browsed the entirity of the music and I see no copyright MORE recent than 1918.

Quoting from…. pdinfo.com

Music and lyrics written by an American author and published in 1922 or earlier are in the Public Domain in the United States.

So, essentially the contents of this book (and most of the other old hymnals that my Mom had saved from her parents) is now in the public domain. There are literally hundreds of songs in these older hymnals. Some are familiar, others aren’t. How many people throw out old hymnals like this thinking they’re worthless? I don’t know, but those looking at recording music from the public domain see these as fairly valuable/useful for documenting the public domain status of a song (or arrangement).

I don’t know why, maybe I’m an archivist of sorts by nature (read: packrat), but it’s sad to me to see some of these things pass from easy availability into obscurity. I guess I’ve always been disappointed to hear of a book that’s gone out of print, because it still might hold something of interest, if only as a historical reference point. So, it should be no surprise that one of the projects I intent to follow up with is to record some of these old hymns that they may be heard again. Another thing I may put some time into is finding a way to convert these public domain gospel hymnals into some sort of PDF to keep them available a little while longer.

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