Originally Posted By: fiddler2007
<...snip...> Originally meant as a cheaper way of selling expensive individual sheet music per song, f.i. for professional (Jazz?) band musicians and singers to be played at gigs etc. I remember in the 6-ties i got such a book as special "don't pass it on item" from my piano teacher coming from a Dutch publishing agency; Only to be sold to the pros, <...>


I had one from a German company that had taken sheet music or Piano Guitar Vocal (PGV) books, snipped out the grand staff (for the piano accompaniment) so only the melody, lyrics and guitar (or uke) chord boxes were left, pasted them together to save space (one song per page) and printed them that way. The title was, "No Dogs", referring to the fact that there were only good songs there ('dogs' being an expression for the unwanted filler songs you get in many music books).

That is where the Fake Book title came along. Without the piano staff arrangement of the song, the pro player was able to read the melody and chords but then had to 'fake' the arrangement, bass lines, countermelody and other rhythm section parts.

Later I got the fist edition of "The Real Book" which was hand written notation full of jazz standards. At the time, in order to get all the tunes that were in that book, you had to buy books from several different publishers, because they didn't allow other companies to 'rent' their songs for publication. So "The Real Book" had a little minor rant printed as an introduction saying they would rather buy the songs legally, but a jazz musician needed all the songs in the repertoire in a single book as bringing a dozen or more books to a gig was impractical.

I had to go to a music store where the clerks knew me personally, ask for the book, and they would get it from the back room. It was clandestine and because of that fun.

Then the publishers decided to join rather than fight, started renting their songs for compilations, and the legal fake book was born.

Now Hal Leonard is selling "The Real Book" with royalties paid to the appropriate publishers and hopefully through them to the composers. It's not quite as complete as the original, as a few stubborn publishers refuse to participate. On the other hand, they corrected most of the errors that were in the illegal "Real Book". (The people who transcribed the songs for the original seemed to have the philosophy that if a chord was good enough to play, it was good enough to substitute - and many of their substitutions were not appropriate),

I'm glad Fake Books have gone legal because I like to reward the authors for the music I use. Hopefully some day with the explosion of different forms of e-madia, the publishers will come to a standard licensing agreement similar to mechanical usage and I'll be able to put the melody and/or lyrics in my fake disks.

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