Glenda read the second co-writer name Jace had listed on my song, and my daughter Tanya set her glass down and walked straight out the door. Because the name was Walter. My late husband. Tanyas father, dead eleven years.
To make stealing my song look legitimate, Jace listed my dead husband as a co-writer, using a man in his grave to pretend the song had come down to him through the family.
Glenda had already taken the song back. Jace, this song is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, since 1983, to Mavis, she said, and held up the certificate with the seal. Cecil mailed it in for me back then and I had forgotten all about it. Copyright lasts the writers whole life plus seventy years, she said, every dime this song earns is hers. Jace said the paper was fake. Is this voice fake too, Glenda said, and the DJ dug out a boombox and played the 1983 cassette, my voice, same words, through the big speakers, and somebody in the back said, bless HIS heart, and people laughed, at him this time.
Then Glenda found the second credit, and it was my Walter.
I am Mavis, seventy. I answered phones at a little radio station in Tupelo for thirty-one years. In 1983 my husband got laid off from the furniture plant, two kids and a light bill we couldnt pay, and one night I sat at the kitchen table and wrote a song, Carry Me Home Jordan, and sang it to the kids at bedtime. My station manager Cecil heard me humming it, made me record it on a cassette in the back studio, and our church choir has sung it for forty years.
My granddaughter Jolene married Jace two years ago, and last Christmas he heard me singing it over the dishes and asked me to sing it into his phone, and in June the single came out, his beat, my words, written by Jace on the back. Mavis, you cant carry a tune in a bucket, he said when I called, nobody pays for an old lady humming at a sink, prove it, Grandma. I did not argue. I climbed to the attic and found the cassette and the brown envelope from Washington, postmarked 1983, that I had not opened in forty years.
A copyright from 1983 settles who wrote a song, and my voice on a dated cassette settles it twice. The song was mine, and every dollar it earns is mine.
But listing a dead man as a co-writer is its own ugliness and its own crime. Jace put Walters name on the song to give himself cover, to make it look like the song had passed to him through his wifes family, and to split the forty-thousand-dollar advance with a man who could not object because he was eleven years in the ground. Tanya walked out because she saw her fathers name stolen by her own son-in-law.
Jace faced the law, not my anger. Claiming a dead persons authorship to launder a stolen song and split an advance is fraud, and the label pulled the single that night and wanted its money back.
You cant carry a tune in a bucket, Jace told me. I carried two children through a hard winter on that song, and I carried my husbands memory, and I would not let a man put Walters name on my work to make his theft look like family. The song is mine, registered since 1983. Walter never wrote a note of it. He just loved it, the way the whole church has for forty years.