Clarence, the angel in “It’s A Wonderful Life”, said it very nicely.
“We never fully know how our lives touch the lives of others.”
That thought pops into my head from time to time, but never more clearly than each quarter when I get my BMI statement.
Broadcast Music Inc is one of the three “performing rights” organizations that serve as clearing houses for royalties paid to songwriters, performers, etc for the songs they wrote, perform, etc, and are played on radio, TV, videos, elevators, et al.
A song makes a few cents every time it’s played. And in a “do the math” scenario, can add up to some pretty big bucks, especially if the song is a pretty big hit.
Imagine making four or five cents.
A couple of million times.
My dear friend Billy Strange still gets a big smile on his face each quarter as the check shows up accounting for the many songs he has written, not the least of which is “Monotonous Melody”, the hit song that still gets played thousands of times each year since its debut back in the early sixties.
Don’t know it?
Oh…right…it was tweaked slightly before it was recorded.
You would know it as “Limbo Rock”.
I never wrote a “Limbo Rock”.
Or had what you could honestly be called a “big hit”.
Still, my name is in the Library of Congress a couple hundred times and I did co-write a song that was on a Grammy nominated bluegrass album and I do still get a quarterly statement from BMI with a couple hundred bucks here, a couple hundred bucks there from the combined few cents here and few cents there that pile up over the weeks.
And a few hundred bucks is more than I have before I open the envelope each time, so it’s all good.
At this point, I get my primary enjoyment out of the whole songwriting experience from two things.
Geographic location.
Google.
More on Google in a minute.
Re’ geography, what a remarkable feeling it is to open up the statement, unfold the itemized listing of what song is being played where and see that something that I made up in my head on some casual afternoon in the not too distant past is now being experienced by people who live in India…England…Belgium…Pakistan…Japan….
Racine, Wisconsin.
Each quarter the list is varied. Each list an adventure all by itself.
Cool, I don’t mind telling ya.
Then, there’s Google.
Every now and then, in an effort to see if anything else I’ve written has found its way to the light of day recently, I type in my name or a song title or a publishing company or an artist that I have been associated with at one time or another.
Internet treasure hunting, after a fashion.
Friday, I found me on You Tube.
Well, not me, but you get the idea.
The Grammy bluegrass thing I mentioned earlier has found a new home.
Claire Lynch did the original version of the song, "My Heart Is A Diamond" on her “Moonlighter” album (available on Rounder Records at fine music retailers and/or Amazon dot com…)
I found a video on YouTube of a bluegrass group I’m unfamiliar with, Susie Glaze and the Hilonesome Band performing the song.
Okay, so it’s not Emmylou Harris.
But, hey, Suzie seems nice enough.
And she obviously has impeccable taste in song selection.
So, now, a whole bunch of people I have never met and will probably never meet are surfing through YouTube and will come across a bluegrass group performing something that came out of my head on some casual afternoon in the not too distant past.
And somebody, somewhere, who I will never know exists, could very likely be quietly going about their daily routine, singing softly to themselves that melody and those words that came out that afternoon.
Clarence, you were right, buddy.
We just never know.
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