Who owns the rights to Ogden Nash's poetry?

Factual Questions
1

Apologies if this is deemed to be a Cafe Society question rather than GQ fodder, but nevertheless:

I, in my modest spare time, have set to music Ogden Nash’s excellent poem “The People Upstairs” for my own amusement. Subsequently I have been asked to perform said composition in various public fora, but alas, as Mr. Nash only departed this mortal coil in 1971 his work is presumably still under copyright. Which means I (legally) need permission to perform the work in public (as far as I understand).

However, Nash wrote and published most of his work in miscellaneous periodicals, which complicates the matter somewhat as I don’t know where this work was first published, nor if that publication captured the rights to it by doing so. The only source I have is a 1962 Pocket Books anthology of Nash’s poetry, plus a whole lot of useless websites that Google kicked up (all happily printing the poem, mind you, and none of them citing copyright or ownership).

So – where do I start? :confused: Any and all suggestions gratefully received.

2

http://www.aenet.org/poems/ognash2.htm

Linell Nash Smith and Isabel Nash Eberstadt are his daughters; Frances Rider Smith is his granddaughter.

3

I bow to your superior Googling skills. You am indeed the man!

4

Heh, nothing to it. I searched on “ogden nash” + copyright
Then just did a quick check to see who the people actually were.

My guess is that nine times out of ten when an author passes away his copyright goes to his family - unless, of course, he willed otherwise.