Read an awesome essay about music by E.L. Doctorow

"We make distinctions between what is anonymous and known, historic and contemporary, amateur and professional. We make distinctions of motive, or felt reality. The voice that finds words for the pain. The voice that chooses words to convey the pain.

Yet the basic and defining distinction is between an oral culture and a written. Enduring folk songs are standards composed orally and given directly into the air, without notation and therefore without regard to property rights. Every song, even a so-called folk song, is composed by one person or perhaps by two. But when the song is not written the creator of the song has neither the means of protecting it nor the opportunity of seeing to it that it is replicated, as it is, by other performers. Perhaps this is not even conceived as desirable, or more likely not even thought of as a possibility.

Oral cultures are proud, creative participatory; the mind gives as it receives; and it is not always clear where the self ends and the community begins. So that over the years if the composed but unwritten song endures, it suffers changes, amendments, revisions, refinements, bevelings, planings, sandings, polishings, oilings, rubbings, handlings, until it stands, as elegantly simple in its presence, as glowing in its grain, as a beautiful piece of country cabinetry

... Whereas today songs are written on paper and published and copyrighted. They may be interpreted but not changed. And it is as if the spirit voices in the air have gone silent as God has been silent since we wrote down his words in a book."

"When people say "our song" they mean they and the song exist together as some sort of generational truth. They are met to make a common destiny. The song names them, it rescues them from the accident of ahistorical genetic existence. They are located in cultural time. A crucial event, a specific setting, a certain smile, a kind of lingo, a degree of belief or skepticism, a particular humor, or a dance step goes with the song. And from these ephemera we make our place in civilization. For good or bad, we have our timely place."

From "Standards," The Best American Essays 1992