If you check out some of the "Bob Dylan" songbooks that were first published in the early 1960s, you'll notice that the authorship of the "words and MUSIC" of the songs included in the songbooks are claimed by "Bob Dylan" and copyrighted by Dylan and his publisher. Yet as Micharel Gray noted in his 2006 book, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:
"In Patrick Humphries' 1984 interview with the Clancys, Paddy [Clancy] suddenly offers this...story about Dylan..: `You want to know where Dylan got his stuff? There was a little folk club here in London, down in the basement; we sang in it one night...Anyway, Al Grossman paid somebody and gave them a tape-recorder, and every folk-singer that went up there was taped, and Bob Dylan got all those tapes...' And Liam [Clancy] agrees with this, adding: `Yes, and the tune of `Farewell] [a song Dylan copyrighted in 1963 and is included in his official songbooks]...whoever was singing harmony was closer to the mike than the guy singing melody, and when [Dylan] wrote his version, he wrote it to the harmony not the melody line.'
"...The songs he probably took specifically from hearing the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing live are: the traditional `Brennan on the Moor,' which becme his `Rambling Gambling Willie' [copyrighted 1962]..' the traditional `The Parting Glass', which mutated into `Restless Farewell'...and the...tune Dominic Behan used for his song `The Patriot Game', which the Clancys sang and from which Dylan...created `With God On Our Side.'
In response to a 1976 query about Dylan's use of the melody of Dominic Behan's "The Patriot Game" song from the late 1950s for Dylan's early 1964 recording of "With God On Our Side," Dominic Behan wrote the following in a January 31, 1976 letter from Happendon, Douglas in Lanark, Scotland:
"Thank you for the interest you are showing in my song, `The Patriot Game". Some years ago I tried to get Dylan to settle the matter as one artist to another. I rang him at an hotel in London where he had been living then. Dylan's reaction was that I didn't have the resources to take any legal action against him, and he therefore replied, `Get lost, bum! The songs I write make other people's attempts at art good.'
"Mr. Dylan was, of course, correct in his view of my financial state. I couldn't take him to court, and, my publishers in America, `The Richmond Organisation', think the whole matter too costly and not worth the candle.
"I wrote the song (words and music) on the 1st January, 1957, after Feargal O'Hanlon had been shot dead the night previously.
"Thanks very much for your interest, though, when dealing with folk as ruthless as Mr. Dylan, I doubt if you and the other honest people around can do a lot of good.
"Thanks anyway and best wishes,
"Dominic Behan."
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