Vol. 27: What's Even Real Anymore?

Two musicians. Two almost unbelievable stories. And a question that is becoming harder to answer.

I recently heard a podcast story about a musician named Harry Footman. It began in 1933, when Footman supposedly became the Justin Bieber of his day: young, famous and adored. Four years later, he released an album called Guilty as Charged. Every song on it was named after a person.

That was where the story turned dark. Listeners began to notice that the names on the tracklist matched people who had gone missing from Footman’s hometown the previous year. The lyrics sounded threatening. Police were called. Authorities eventually tried to arrest him during a performance, but Footman escaped, leading police on a three-hour chase involving a hundred cars.

When the car finally stopped, nobody was inside. There was only a brick holding down the gas pedal.

Footman was never seen again. Copies of Guilty as Charged, according to the story, still circulate online. Some carry an impossible date on the sleeve: “October 32, 1937.”

It is an irresistible music story. It is also false.

Harry Footman was not a forgotten pop idol. There is no historical record of him, no contemporary newspaper coverage, no album and no trail of missing people that matches a tracklist. The character has the texture of old folklore, which is probably why it felt so convincing to me.

I still cannot tell you who invented the story or when it first appeared. The version I heard may be a recent retelling of an older internet legend. What I can say is that it sounded less like something invented for a podcast than a piece of music history I had somehow missed.

I believed it.

Then I found the real story that made Footman’s seem possible in the first place.

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Pat Hare

In 1954, blues guitarist Pat Hare recorded a song called “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby.” On its face, it was a dark blues number, the sort of exaggerated language the genre has always allowed. Hare was not some anonymous novelty act either. He was a striking guitarist who played with artists including Howlin’ Wolf, James Cotton, Bobby Bland and Muddy Waters, and his distorted guitar sound was years ahead of its time.

Nine years after recording that song, Hare shot and killed his girlfriend in Minneapolis, then shot a police officer who arrived at the scene. He was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.

Knowing that history does not turn “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” into a confession or a prediction. It does make the song harder to hear as just a performance. The words now belong to a real person who later committed a terrible act, and that knowledge follows the listener through every verse.

After learning that Harry Footman was made up, I immediately wondered whether Pat Hare was too. He was not. The recordings, the crime and the conviction are all real.

The two stories are unsettling together. The fake one sounds plausible because it has borrowed the shape of real music history. The real one is unsettling precisely because it sounds invented.

For a long time, that might have been the whole lesson: do not believe every great music story you hear. But lately, it feels like the beginning of a much larger problem.

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A Band That Was Not a Band

Last year, my brother-in-law came across an all-female rock band on Instagram. He saw a Reel, liked what he heard, saw the images and an account with a huge following, and assumed he had discovered a real group.

Why would he not? The band had faces, a look, songs and an audience. It seemed exactly like the kind of discovery that happens every day on social media.

Later, he learned the musicians were AI-generated.

The account was real. The music was there to stream. The people following it were real people. But the women presented as the band had not formed a group, rehearsed together, written songs from their lives or built an audience one show at a time. They were a created identity.

I was fooled by a musician from the past who never existed. My brother-in-law was fooled by a band from the present that does not exist. Neither of us was hunting for fake music. We found these stories the same way most of us find music now: through a podcast, a Reel and the small rush of thinking we have found something interesting.

That is the part that stays with me. A fake artist no longer needs to be a clever story told around a campfire. It can have songs, followers, photos and a convincing place in your feed.

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Where I Draw the Line

AI has a place in music. The question is what role it should be allowed to play.

Music has always absorbed new technology. Multitrack recording, sampling, drum machines, sequencers, pitch correction, digital editing and DJ software all changed what musicians could do and how quickly they could do it. A DJ who uses software to help match tempos has not stopped being a DJ. A producer who edits on a computer has not handed over their creative judgment.

AI can fit into that tradition. It can help clean up a recording, separate a vocal from a track, identify a key, organize a session or help an artist work through an idea. The artist still has to decide what stays, what goes and what the song is trying to say.

That is broadly how Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. and Dr. Dre have spoken about AI. Mason has said it is common in the pop and R&B sessions he works in. Dre sees it as another creative tool, much like the drum machine or synthesizer was in its own time.

I understand that argument, and for the most part I agree with it. I do not mind AI making certain tasks easier. That is not fundamentally different from the tools DJs use now to blend records, match BPMs or make a technical skill more accessible.

For me, the important thing is what AI replaced.

If AI helps a real artist get from an idea to a finished recording, it is a tool. If it replaces the voice, face, personality, performance and life story that listeners think sit behind the music, it has become something else.

People will reasonably bring up Auto-Tune here. It can reshape a vocal dramatically. A drum machine can take the place of a drummer. Those are fair comparisons, up to a point. But Auto-Tune does not invent the singer. A drum machine does not give itself a backstory. DJ software can line up two records, but it cannot explain why those two records belong together in the first place.

The AI band that fooled my brother-in-law was not a musician using a new tool. The technology was presented as the musician.

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Why It Matters

Some people may say that none of this should matter. If a song moves you, perhaps it makes no difference whether the singer lived the lyrics or whether the face in the video belongs to anyone at all.

I can understand that view. Music is often bigger than biography. We have all loved songs without knowing much about the person who made them.

Still, the story behind music changes the way we hear it. Pat Hare’s history makes “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” more disturbing because it is tied to a life that actually happened. The Harry Footman legend is compelling for the opposite reason: it makes us imagine a life that never existed.

Both stories depend on the same thing. We want to believe there is a person somewhere inside the music. Someone who made choices, had experiences and brought something of themselves to the song.

That is what makes AI artists feel different to me. They do not only generate a sound. They can generate the appearance of a human story around the sound.

I am comfortable with AI helping musicians create. I am less comfortable when the musician is the part it removes.

Harry Footman was never real. Pat Hare was. Somewhere between those two stories sits the future of music, and I suspect it is going to become harder to tell where the human ends and the invention begins.

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