Did I Ever Tell You

My dad wrote a song. Well, he wrote the lyrics to a song, "Did I Ever Tell You." I found out about this song after he died. I was going through some of his things and found the correspondence between him and someone who was helping him get the song published. I don't have the lyrics or the song, so I decided to try to find it.

I contacted the Library of Congress (LoC), where they found a copy of the lyrics and music. But they won't send me a copy without the permission of the copyright holder. To find the copyright holder I have to commission a copyright search by someone at the LoC. This copyright search will cost me $150 per hour. They have estimated that the search will take two hours or less.

Well, I just don't have $300 to pay for a copyright search when I don't know if the copyright holder will even give permission for the LoC to send me a copy. Someday I might have. But not today.

The song was recorded by someone named Annette Warren circa 1940. When I google that name all I get is hits on Annette Benning and Warren Beatty. No luck finding other people mentioned in the correspondence, either.

I'll keep trying, and if I come up with an extra $300, I'll commission that search. But until then I'm sort of stuck.

So I may or may not ever get to hear or read the words to the published song that my dad wrote.