In the conclusion to my first book on happy musical accidents, I gathered statements by 20 songwriters about where their songs came from. To a person, they claimed they didn’t write their songs, but rather, someone or something else did: smoke, the ancients, spirits, ghosts, God, nightmares, whatever.
Some examples:
Carole King: “The song was written by something outside myself, through me.”
Hank Williams: “People don’t write music. It comes to you. You sit there and wait and it comes to you.”[1]
Then along comes Reverend Gary Davis, who adds to this consensus view in, well, the funniest of all such stories, courtesy of Dave Van Ronk in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Reverend Davis, a blues and gospel singer proficient on guitar from Durham, North Carolina, settled in New York City in the late 1940s and influenced numerous musicians in the Greenwich Village “folk” crowd in the 1950s and 1960s.
Up-and-coming folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, with ties to Greenwich Village, had selected one of Gary’s tunes “Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way)” for their first Warner Brothers album Peter, Paul, and Mary (1962).
To get his rights in order, Gary had to sign a contract with the Warner-associated publisher Harms-Whitmark, which decided to turn the signing into a media event. They invited reporters from all the trade papers, along with a handful of old-time songwriters on their roster.
They were all seated around this long table, and Rev. Davis was seated in the center, and the ceremonial signing was about to happen. The flash bulbs were popping and . . . just as they were about to hand Gary the golden pen to sign the contract, someone asked the formal question “Reverend Davis, are you the author of this song?”
Gary paused a dramatic pause, and in his preacher’s voice announced: “No, I did not write that song.” No one knew what to do. The reporters were scribbling madly, elderly executives were popping nitro pills all around the table. And then Gary spoke again: “It was revealed to me in a dream!”[2]
CODA
Paul McCartney for one would understand exactly where Reverend Davis was coming from. The former Beatle woke up one morning with a fully formed song in his head. It was so good, he hawked it around to all his friends, asking what it was: “Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”
BBC Radio named “Yesterday” the best song of the 20th century.
Paul McCartney for one would understand exactly where Reverend Davis was coming from. The former Beatle woke up one morning with a fully formed song in his head. It was so good, he hawked it around to all his friends, asking what it was: “Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”
BBC Radio named “Yesterday” the best song of the 20th century.
- Edward Allan Faine, Serendipity Doo-Dah: True Stories of Happy Musical Accidents, Book One (Takoma Park, MD: IM Press, 2017), 133–7.
- Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2013), 139.
Photo credit: Adobe Stock / Yevhen
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