"My cup runneth over with bloody water" -- Paul K.

July 9, 2009 10:02 AM

Kentucky folksinger Paul K. has released his entire catalog online under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

(Scroll down through the absurdly large text and lengthy lacunae on K's site to get to the links!)

From the fellers at Trouser Press:

Paul K is one of the post-punk generation's first bona fide bluesmen, a guy whose tales from the darkside are drawn from his own experiences as a reformed junkie and small-time criminal with the jailhouse record to prove it. Throughout the mid-'80s, the Louisville, Kentucky native (né Kopasz) released dozens of home-recorded cassette albums, but the onetime winner of a debating scholarship hamstrung his own progress by living a lifestyle sufficiently shadowy that he ended up a New York squatter pulling small-time stickups to make ends meet.

I'd particularly recommend The Big Nowhere, with its "Washington Square"-inspired slinker "Flood the Market," and last year's astounding Maintain Radio Silence.

posted by ford and the prefects (11 comments total)

I'm not a blues-listening person, but I heartily applaud more CC licensing. Free culture! *holds up fist*
posted by DU at 10:16 AM on July 9, 2009

[this is good]
posted by sciurus at 10:16 AM on July 9, 2009

Wow. I got a couple of his albums in the mid-90s (including The Big Nowhere) and wondered what had happened to him. Just by listening you could tell he was one of those guys who lived the life he sang about and it was easy enough to assume he'd ended up dead in some shadowy way. So it's a relief just to know he's still living, and good news to know he's been recording.
posted by ardgedee at 10:20 AM on July 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

I was very happy to be able to listen to misc. stuff via the Archive like the Patriots set. I think Paul K. is way too good to stay hidden, but maybe he wants it that way? Anyway, if you visit the blue Mr. K. please tour outside of KY, and its OK with me if you want to put "Radiant and White" on a few more albums. Seriously.
posted by drowsy at 10:58 AM on July 9, 2009

Which CC license? There's been some (reasonable, I think) criticism of CC for having several licenses that are all called more or less the same, but are very varying degrees of free. The license that allows no commercial use and no changes is a lot less interesting than a attribution-sharealike license, for instance.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:09 AM on July 9, 2009

Which CC license? There's been some (reasonable, I think) criticism of CC for having several licenses that are all called more or less the same, but are very varying degrees of free. The license that allows no commercial use and no changes is a lot less interesting than a attribution-sharealike license, for instance.

According to icon on Paul K's site, it's the "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0" license. That's a link to the "human-readable" version; here's the "legal code" version.

I'm not very well-versed in CC, but it appears to me that this license allows us to share and "remix" the works, with attribution to the artist.
posted by ford and the prefects at 11:16 AM on July 9, 2009

Hey, nobody threw a party when I gave all my songs away for free. Why the hell not?!

Oh, yeah. Nobody's heard of me.
posted by grubi at 11:26 AM on July 9, 2009

even more respect to paul k. than i had before. i wish more talented people would contribute to the cc, and more cc contributors would pay as much attention to their craft(s) as paul k.
posted by the aloha at 11:29 AM on July 9, 2009

Yeah, the "Attribution" license is the most liberal license out there; all it means is that if you reuse it, you have to keep his name on it. If you want a license more liberal than that, you really just want public domain (which CC also offers a button for).
posted by roll truck roll at 11:55 AM on July 9, 2009

Wow -- I sorta kept up with Paul's output over the years, but it's awesome to read this on MeFi. He played a blistering set supporting the Afghan Whigs in Toronto once that has always stuck with me.

Last I heard he was writing film reviews for a Lexington weekly, I think. In any case -- it's great to hear about this.
posted by vickyverky at 3:03 PM on July 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Great news, thanks! I don't know how many times I saw Paul K at Tewligans.
posted by ae4rv at 1:34 PM on July 11, 2009 [1 favorite]