Jason Lee Guthrie

• PhD in Mass Communication
• Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Clayton State University

Press coverage of the relationship between music executive Phil Walden and President Jimmy Carter focused on issues of popular music law like piracy, payola, and copyright, often insinuating the likelihood of quid pro quos and scandal. This article explores Walden’s meteoric rise, his lobbying for copyright reform, and news coverage of his relation...

The growing literature on cultural depictions of the White working class in American popular music has touched on issues of copyright, compensation, and residual ownership of song rights. This study expands upon existing work by conducting case studies on three influential figures in American music history: Stephen Foster, Woody Guthrie, and Phil W...

Advocates of an expanded public domain and less restrictive copyright policies have made Woody Guthrie a cause célèbre for their point of view. Meditations on his artistic persona are used to support their argument, as is a direct quote about copyright that is cited with surprising frequency despite lacking proper citation. This research locates th...

Media history is more important than ever. Yes, this is true because media are more pervasive, more fundamental to our lives than ever. It is also true because media historians form one of the final bulwarks of fact-based research in a world awash with false claims and fake news. Yet, the importance of media history is not only ontological and meth...

Much of the recent scholarship on media and the Middle East has focused on the unique role that internet access and social media played in the cultural revolu- tions collectively known as the “Arab Spring.” In Media of the Masses, Andrew Simon offers a richly historicized account of an earlier media technology and its influence upon the formation o...

Funding for American public broadcasting is regularly questioned today as part of partisan political wrangling. Conservative administrations since Nixon have challenged the notion of public media as a public good and pitted the tax-payer-funded system against the alleged efficiencies of the free market in straw man arguments that play well to their...

While I am not able to say definitively whether or not the copyright claim in “This Land” is valid, I do believe the case for its validity is stronger than many previous commentators have suggested. It does not take a professional musicologist to note several differences in the sheet music from 1945 and 1956. They are in different keys and differen...

Folk music enjoys an almost mythic place in our popular imagination, a fact perhaps best evidenced by the cyclical revivals it experiences in public interest and the frequency with which major artists “return to their roots” in late career retrospectives. The aura of purity and sacredness that permeates popular understanding of folk music means tha...

Kate Carpenter has done an incredible service to the discipline of history by creating Drafting the Past. As its subtitle, a podcast on the craft of history, suggests, the show features interviews with historians that are adept in writ- ing about their research and in sharing it with the world. In producing this podcast, Carpenter is addressing an...

As a Southern governor with presidential ambitions, Jimmy Carter “had treated multimillionaire [Capricorn Records co-founder Phil] Walden like a good ol’ boy—with respect.” So wrote Rolling Stone reporter Art Harris of Carter’s invisible, showbiz campaign in December 1975, and he added, “Now that Carter requires a good deal of money and loyalty to...

Previous studies of the relationship between production cultures and intellectual property (IP), particularly those covering the nineteenth century, have primarily focused on the written word. This edited volume expands that analysis into a variety of visual mediums such as painting, architecture, sculpture, and photography. The ways that copyright...

Music scholar Andrew Mall’s God Rock, Inc. provides a series of in- depth, qualitative vignettes on various aspects of the American Christian music industry. As the book’s subtitle, The Business of Niche Music, sug- gests, these many threads are meant to weave into a body of work that can inform our understanding of the ways that niche music market...

I never knew my father. I asked my mom about him once when I was nine. Granddaddy froze in his La-Z-Boy and mom just gave me a look like cold death. I never asked again...

The notion that antebellum Americans preferred daguerreotypes over paper-based photographic mediums is pervasive in histories of photography. The standard version of that history cites the superior quality and artistic appeal of the daguerreotype as the reason for its ascendancy. Mazie Harris successfully challenges that long-held notion on two fro...

The tagline for Public Books is “an online magazine of ideas, art, and scholarship.” Their new podcast, Public Books 101, seeks to augment the magazine’s mission to bring contemporary scholarship to a popular audience. The first season of the podcast, released in July 2020, covered “The Internet” across five episodes by featuring conversations with...

The impact that COVID-19 has had on pedagogical instruction of recording technologies, the music business, podcasting, and other aspects of audio production cannot be overstated. Many of us scrambled in the early shift towards online instruction and have continued to innovate ways to make virtual and face-to-face instruction work during a global pa...

Whenever the name Woody Guthrie is mentioned, a few things invariably come to mind. The first is almost certainly his most famous song, “This Land is Your Land” with its familiar refrain that spans from “California to the New York Island.” After that immediately recognizable melody and lyric, the image of a dusty, train-hopping hobo – of an archety...

Immersive journalism has been called "the future of news." Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality mediums offer significant promise for an industry grappling with the challenges of the digital age. Yet, as journalism looks to a future where audiences can virtually experience the aftermath of a weather event or a war as if they were actually there, t...

Visions of Glory is an engaging and inventive visual history of the American Civil War attractively disguised as a coffee table book. Edited by Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan for the University of Georgia Press’s UnCivil Wars series, the book surfaces underrepresented images of the war that are especially relevant to our evolving collective me...

The Walter J. Brown Media Archives, which include the Peabody Awards Collection, are the third-largest broadcasting archive in the United States, preceded only by those at the University of California–Los Angeles and the Library of Congress. Housed at the University of Georgia, the collections are home to nearly 100,000 unique titles and 5 million...

To answer the recent wave of attacks on the legitimacy of journalism with a call for journalists to grow more circumspect—even “humble”—about their claims to objective fact seems counter-intuitive. Yet, this is what C. W. Anderson’s ultimately finds as he explores the history of data journalism in America. Apostles of Certainty is wide-ranging in t...

“Either write things worth reading, Or do things worth the writing.” Benjamin Franklin wrote these words in the 1738 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, and they form a fitting mantra for the most prolific author, scien- tist, and statesman in colonial America. Franklin’s writings have been the subject of immense study since his death in 1790. His...

The historical contours of Randall Stephens’s latest book will be familiar to most interested readers. As its subtitle suggests, the history of rock music parallels a messianic hero’s journey narrative. Rock emerged from the unlikely womb of early twentieth-century Pentecostalism to be at first reviled by mid-century mainline Christians and ultimat...

The history of popular music awards has run alongside the history of media technology and mass communication now for nearly a century. Music is annually honored at the Grammys and MTV's Video Music Awards; in genre-specific celebrations like the BET, Country Music, and Dove Awards; in conjunction with visual media at the Oscars, Emmys, and Golden G...

The pioneering work of historians such as Robert Taft, William Welling and Bill Frassanito has contributed to more than just the history of photography as a medium. It has helped establish the photograph as a valuable primary source on par with textual records like news articles and personal correspondence. Historical photographs can provide valuab...

The state of doctoral education in media and mass communication programs is at a crossroads. Few programs prepare future faculty to participate with current, digital topics. But job descriptions for tenure-track faculty list digital skills as required competencies for many positions. While many defend the doctorate as a research degree, the majorit...

This article sheds light on a forgotten case from the history of photographic copyright: "Brady & Gibson v. Bellew" (1865).

This article focuses on Mathew Brady’s attempts to use copyright to protect his photographs. For a time, Brady received so much credit in the press that his name became synonymous with all photographs of the Civil War. This prominence in the photography trade and in the public imagination makes Brady’s use of copyright an ideal case for considering...

Mise-en-scène describes the placement of all characters and objects within the scope of the camera’s lens. Stylistically, it can be used to describe the director’s “eye”; all that they choose to reveal, or conceal, within a shot. It refers to such specific elements as props, position, posture, point-of-view, camera angle, color, and lighting. When...

This article explores Stephen Foster’s understanding and use of copyright. It examines what his copyright strategy can reveal about his professionalism as a songwriter and about his worldview as an important influencer of early American popular culture. It adapts the anthropological theory of ritual economy to theorize how Foster’s economic decisio...

Benjamin Franklin was the most prolific and profitable author in colonial America. Work on the history of intellectual property has increasingly identified Franklin as a central figure, particularly in the philosophical development of American copyright law. His understanding and use of what we now think of as intellectual property are potentially...

The early history of photography is a byzantine labyrinth of artistic, entrepreneurial, and technological innovations across multiple continents during the first half of the nineteenth century. Sarah Kate Gillespie's The Early American Daguerreotype represents years of study into the American origins of photography, and it makes important contribut...

JoAnne O'Connell's new book on Stephen Foster is the latest biographical contribution to the literature on one of the most important composers in popular music history. Foster's birth on July 4th, 1826, as cannon fire and military bands heralded the fiftieth anniversary of the nation, has been an irresistible point of departure for all his previous...

Part of the goal of the International Paralympic Committee is to "touch the heart of all people for a more equitable society" by exposing people to adaptive sports, with the goal of improving public views toward people with disabilities. The authors hypothesized that exposure to parasocial contact with images of athletes with disabilities could lea...

In the three hundred year history of statutory copyright debates have continued to rage about the aims of copyright law and how it can best fulfill them. Striking a balance between the disparate interests of content creators, publishers, and the public domain has proved persistently difficult. Yet, a myopic focus on the intricacies of legal policy...

The complex and contentious nature of the relationship between society and the individual has been the subject of theorization now for centuries. Joanne Finkelstein rightly identifies the history of popular culture as an ideal observation point from which to analyze this relationship in modernity. Yet, while her rich writing style and sporadic burs...

Words such as "intense," "provocative," and "extreme" seem appropriate descriptors for the cinematic and musical experience that is Damien Chazelle's Whiplash. Moments of the film are a sensory assault, and the effect is punctuated by a dramatic conclusion that pushes the boundaries of what music and film can do when fused together. The level of cr...

Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music opens with an ambitious program, the critique of two and a half millennia of Western knowledge. While this initial statement is perhaps more symbolic than substantive, Noise does undertake a significant historical revision of the last three hundred years of Western music. In doing so, it contri...

The early history of radio is an absorbing and complex saga. Often told from the narrative perspective of its inventors, technical milestones, or regulatory developments, little has been written about the commercial history of early radio and its influence on the commodification of music. Using a theoretical framework of commodification based upon...

Over a frenetic montage of flight and travel footage, "What Difference Does It Make: A Film About Making Music" opens to the sounds of phone conversations between newly accepted students in the Red Bull Music Academy and the film's producers. This divergent mix of lo-fi sound with elegant, high definition visuals sets the spastic, eclectic, and eve...