Johnny Depp is being accused of plagiarism regarding a track on 18, his new album-length collaboration with famed guitarist Jeff Beck. Folklorist and documentarian Bruce Jackson claims in an interview with Rolling Stone that lyrics from one of Depp’s two ostensibly original songs on the album were taken verbatim from a toast performed by Slim Wilson, a former inmate of the Missouri State Penitentiary.
Jackson first met Wilson in 1964, when Wilson was serving time for armed robbery, and Jackson was recording inmates’ experiences. The two would go on to collaborate on what Rolling Stone reported as Wilson’s “wildly outlandish, funny, ribald form of narrative Black folk poetry.” Wilson’s toast, “Hobo Ben,” was featured on Jackson’s 1974 album of toasts, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.
The Depp track in question, “Sad Mother****in’ Parade,” appears to lift lines directly from “Hobo Ben.” The song title itself is derived from a line in the toast that runs, “[Y]ou better try to keep you ass in this corner of shade/’cause if the Man come you make a sad mother****in’ parade.”
The “Hobo Ben” toast also includes the passage “‘Ladies of culture and beauty so refined, is there one among you that would grant me wine?/I’m raggedy I know, but I have no stink/and God bless the lady that’ll buy me a drink.’/Heavy-hipted Hattie turned to Nadine with a laugh/and said, ‘What that funky mother****er really need, child, is a bath.’”
Depp is alleged to have used phrases from the passage in his lyric, “I’m raggedy, I know, but I have no stink / God bless the lady that’ll buy me a drink / What that funky motherfucker really needs, child, is a bath.”
The album currently credits only Beck and Depp as songwriters, and makes no mention of the toast, Wilson, or Jackson. “The only two lines I could find in the whole piece that [Depp and Beck] contributed are ‘Big time mother****er’ and ‘Bust it down to my level,’” Jackson told American Songwriter. “Everything else is from Slim’s performance in my book. I’ve never encountered anything like this. I’ve been publishing stuff for 50 years, and this is the first time anybody has just ripped something off and put his own name on it.”
No legal action pertaining to the lyrics has been taken at this time but Jackson’s son, music and intellectual property lawyer Michael Lee Jackson, has stated his belief that the lyrics in question are improperly credited. “They do not reflect the actual authorship of those lyrics,” he told American Songwriter. “It’s just not plausible, in my opinion, that Johnny Depp or anybody else could have sat down and crafted those lyrics without almost wholly taking them from some version of my father’s recording and/or book where they appeared.”