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the music business.
At the Pasadena hearing Mr. Bono made the same point, observing that songwriters don't have the rights they should because many of them signed contracts when they were very green about the music business, whereas music publishers have, as he put it, "a battalion of lawyers." Although Mr. Bono's comments need no support, articles in Billboard magazine (reproduced in the appendix to this statement) , as well as number of biographies or autobiographies of musicians, statement reinforce his comment. For example, Willie Dixon, the most famous and prolific of blues composers, put it this way in his autobiography:
I call it swindling but most people call it smart business when you take advantage of someone who don't know no better. I didn't know anything about copyright laws or anything like that.
I thought I was dealing with honest people and when you trust someone who's dishonest, you get bitten. The law can take care of it if you can get enough money and get a lawyer to get justice. They [Chess Records] felt like if they could keep you poor enough, you wouldn't have nothing to fight with and that's the truth. I didn't have $2 a lot of times to have a copyright paper on a song sent into Congress.-^
Don Snowden, who collaborated with Willie Dixon on the autobiography explained how the copyright in the musical composition dovetailed with record contracts:
[T]he chief bone of contention among Chess artists concerned the symbiotic relationship with Arc Music, the label's in-house publishing company formed in 1953. The Chess brothers were partners in Arc Music with Gene and Harry Goodman, who ran the publishing company from New York. Ironically, given the number of claims that have been filed against Arc Music by black blues artists, the Goodmans were the brothers of Benny Goodman, who had effectively broken the color barrier in jazz in 1936 by including pianist Teddy Wilson and later vibes player Lionel Hampton in his group.
It was common practice for the early independent record companies to start up their own publishing wings — and sometimes placing the rights to their songs with the in
^ Willie Dixon, "I Am the Blues" 99-100 (1989) . Like Muddy Waters, Dixon signed a retroactive work for hire agreement, which he subsequently got overturned with legal help. In his autobiography '"he also talks about Chess's practice of putting its publisher's or other people's names on composer's songs. See id. at 20Q.