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These are songs someone wrote, but have been played so many times by so many people they are just sorta pulbic domain. The blues guys aren't worried so much about who wrote what, they want to play!



Works of any kind become part of the public domain, because they pre-date copyright laws, they were never copyrighted in the first place, or their copyright has expired. Unfortunately, a lot of early, seminal musicians never copyrighted anything and have been getting shafted ever since.