Songs Whose Names Changed Very Slightly #45:
Bob Dylan used to play an old folk blues song called Roll On John. He never recorded it, but it's there on the well known, much-bootlegged Cynthia Gooding radio show, Folksinger's Choice, from March 11 1962.
Move forward a full 50 years and he recorded a song, this time of his own, called Roll On, John. It has no connection with the other except the almost-identical name, and is a tribute to John Lennon. He's only ever played it live twice, both in England last year.
The Folksinger's Choice tape has been widely circulated for years and is even easier to obtain now, as it's on open sale on CD. This is partly due to an unproven but widespread belief that recently arose, that performances broadcast on the radio in the US are copyright only in the US. Check Amazon and you'll see scores of CDs, by all kinds of people, of tapes that were previously bootlegs but originally legitimate concert broadcasts.
Another reason is that everything Bob Dylan recorded more than 50 years ago is out of copyright unless the record company have renewed it - and they can't really do that with stuff they've never released, such as the Gooding tape, unless they release it, in however limited a way. (Some strange collections of CD-Rs surface now and then, in editions of 100 or so with no artwork, which are believed to be official Sony products. They will include, for example a Dylan album from nearly 50 years ago plus everything from the relevant sessions that's still in the vaults. The fact they were released to that extent renews copyright. Or it might do. Sony think it's worth a try, anyway...)
And a third is, I think, that Amazon have given up trying to tell which CDs of old and/or live stuff are legit and which are not. It's not that surprising - for years they've allowed people on the Marketplace to sell a CD (called Dylan and sometimes referred to as A Fool Such As I) that has bonus tracks that have only ever been released on bootlegs - just in case it wasn't already obvious enough that it was a pirate, as the album had long been deleted. (It finally got resurrected last year, but only as part of the Complete Album Collection box set.)
The song Roll On John - no comma - featured startlingly in a recent episode of Girls, but performed by cast members, and with three-part harmonies.
