I believe songwriting is less about authenticity than it is fidelity to the song. While you can play games that you know beforehand are not going to come off, the preponderance of time spent in serious purpose, as it were, is on working up a song rather than working out a song or shoehorning a song.
That said, you have to know what you’re treading lightly around before you can do so successfully. The folk musics of Macedonia or Malta or Madagascar or Mali or Mexico are bound to have exerted their influence at some point in history and we have learnt from our own traditions as much as we have ignored, say, ritual music or rural music found nowhere else. It’s true that the blues and other regional music forms do make their presence felt in far off approximations. Regardless of what you think of the Bluesbreakers or Blues Influence or other variously identified by the music they play, bands. No matter what opinion you hold on the Yardbirds or any white group that did a blues cover ever.
One can readily say the same for jazz and rock’n’roll. Not to mention disco, funk, rhythm’n’blues, soul, gospel, rap,
Two things to bear in mind:
- in the early pre-recording days of field music, songs were passed on from one musician to the next, often with embellisments or swapped lines;
- nobody preaches authenticity to the makers of Moog sythesizer recordings nor trouble to argue the origin or adherence of someone with an emulator under their arm
I’m going to do something foolhardy and argue with the viewpoint of a black female singer and touring band leader, and say that I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as saying that it’s rock music when some white band plays it and then R & B when the black guy does it. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley are in all likelihood the premier rock’n’roll singer-songwriters. What Buddy Holly wrote and Bill Haley didn’t write are essential part of the canon but they don’t have either the number of classics nor the resonance. There are enough covers of Who Do You Love? out there to sink a rockin’ battleship.