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-house publishing company was a condition of an artist getting recorded. Label owners could, with a stroke of the pen, split songwriting credits [and therefore royalties] by adding names or pseudonyms to the copyright. The most famous example at Chess was "Maybelline, " credited to Chuck Berry, rock n'roll deejay Alan Freed and Russ Fratto, the man who was printing up the record labels for Chess at the time.^
Chess /Arc Music was hardly alone in this practice; Atlantic Records was also notorious, and even famous composers such as Duke Ellington were forced to share authorship credits and royalties with their music publishers. In his book "Hit Men," Frederic Dannen stated regarding the independent labels:
The pioneers deserve praise for their foresight but little for their integrity. Many of them were crooks. Their victims were usually poor blacks, the inventors of rock and roll, though whites did not fare much better. It was a common trick to pay off a black artist with a Cadillac worth a fraction of what he was owed. Special mention is due Herman Lubinsky, owner of Savoy Records in Newark, who recorded a star lineup of jazz, gospel, and rhythm and blues artists and paid scarcely a dime in royalties.
Dannen also quotes Hy Weiss, founder of the Old Town record label, as stating "What were these bums off the street?" and as defending the practice of giving Cadillacs instead of royalties with reasoning that evokes the memory of Earl Butz, President Nixon's one-time Secretary of Agriculture: "So what, that's what they wanted. You had to have credit to buy the Cadillac."^ Apparently even those songwriters without an appetite for Cadillacs had no choice but to give up their copyright:
[Levy] saw nothing wrong, for example, in putting his name on other people's songs so that he could get writer's as well as publisher's royalties. When Ritchie Cordell wrote "It's Only Love" for Tommy James and the Shondells, ... Morris [Levy], [Cordell] said, "gave me back the demo bent in half and told me if his name wasn't on it, the song didn't come out."^
* Id. at 185. Freed was indicted in 1960 in a payola scandal and admitted taking $2,500. See Frederic Dannen, "Hit Men" 43 (1991) .
^ Id. at 49.
^ Id. at 48-49.