I Dropped CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing Inc)

For almost two decades, I have been a responsible itinerant church musician, worship leader, and songwriter.  Part of that equation has always been attaining a license to Christian Copyright Licensing Inc. (CCLI for short). *There happens to be another CCLI that I still heartily support (Couple to Couple League–they teach Natural Family Planning and they rock).

When I was first getting started playing for different groups, such as parishes, youth rallies, prayer groups, young adult groups, healing masses, etc., I always had my CCLI license to ensure that the songs I had covered had been legally protected. I would insist that if you are in this boat, you, too, must comply and be ensured that your status is active.

However, the last eighteen months I have been helming the Prayer Meeting Podcast, it was decided early on that I had to forgo the vast majority of worship songs in my repertoire. This is because CCLI does not offer an option to use their songs in a podcast format. (Except that they do: they require that the songs themselves be sung live in the context of an actual worship service). Due to the constraints of my setup (my studio can only fit one person, maybe two), that was simply not going to happen.

So I took a deep breath and made a decision, right then and there, to use non-copyright-protected songs. That is, songs in the public domain, written before 1922. Or, songs for which there is no author attibution: many of these are either spirituals, or simple praise songs written with no pretense to make money off of these. Or, my own songs, or songs from my friends. Or, songs from the indie songwriting community who just want to get their songs out there, and are happy to forgo this as well.

I am now nearly forty episodes in, have had formats changed multiple times, and am now including music notation with every single episode. You would think that I would be wearing thin on my song selection. Not a chance.

The vast majority of old hymns considered to be well-known today probably, by my own estimation, count among three dozen. This doesn’t include seasonal favorites (like Christmas carols). Some of these old hymns are only familiar because a contemporary artist has discovered it, added their own signature chorus to it, recorded it, published it, and copyrighted it. And good for them.

Anybody could do this. One of the remarkable features about public domain songs is how eminently pliable they are. They are play-dough for the music set. A melody can be altered. Antiquated words can be updated. A six-versed (or more) hymn can be edited into a three-verse hymn with a chorus and bridge.

All the while, they can be drafted with a contemporary mindset. They can be written with melody and guitar, and performed using modern techniques (like combinations of partial capos). They can sound like they were written yesterday, but contain riches of doctrine that is sorely missing in the vast majority (but not all) of contemporary praise songs.

In short, I had built up a repertoire consisting of solely these songs; so vast, my database listing has swelled to well over a thousand titles I’ve yet to learn.

This started overflowing into my own worship circles outside of the podcast. I experimented as to whether I could actually pull off doing these songs in a church setting.

To call my experiment a success is to put it mildly. People were singing. They knew the songs I had chosen; and those that didn’t knew how to pick them up easily. Some hadn’t sung these songs for years–decades. I had brought back strong memories of when they had used these songs for the first time, and were left, nearly forgotten, when the rise of the praise and music industry occurred.

I still will support good current praise and worship songs. I will have a top 2013 list in a week or two. I will still have a countdown of the songs that have moved the most. I recognize I am in the minority, and that much of the public has indicated a desire to use that contemporary praise song they had heard on the radio. If the opportunity occurs where I could join back, I would.

But it’s interesting. A few months ago, I decided to play an “old” Chris Tomlin tune, something from his second album. And I hate to say this, but it felt dated. It felt like it was past its prime. So many new Chris Tomlin songs had come out since then, that those songs were nagging at me to play those instead. But who’s to say that these current songs–some of them with very good theology–would be dated and ignored another decade down the road?

And ironically, a robust hymn like “Immortal Invisible God Only Wise” can sound as current and fresh as ever. It’s timeless. It’s not stuck in some decade that would be discarded the moment high-schoolers grow into their thirties.

Pick up any single old hymnal. There are between two-hundred and five hundred hymns–much of them with robust theology, beautiful poetic imagery, and melodies that are actually melodic and singable–in a single volume. And there are hundreds of these volumes out there, encompassing every denomination. And consider that this generation really knows only about thirty such hymns.

We have a lot more treasures to discover.

What do you think?

When I first started using CCLI.