While scrounging for songs that have as many descendants as “S/He Called Me Baby“, I keep stumbling across songs that have many, many covers but it seems that each of the covers is covering the original rather than covering covers of covers.
I suppose that that makes sense, of course. How many times are you going to find a cover that you want to cover more than the original?
Or, put another way, how often is the cover *BETTER* than the original?
There aren’t that many cases, I tell you what.
I found one here, though.
Jimmy Cliff came out with a delightful song in 1970 on his album Goodbye Yesterday
Nice song, right? Well, Springsteen covered it and covered the hell out of it. Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, absolutely rips it open. Well, I spent 1998 and 1999 trying to find where in the heck I could find this song… The Essential Bruce Springsteen
I was able to find it used at the local record shoppe. 99 Cents… and, my goodness, it’s one of those songs that not only sounds better on vinyl, it’s one that sounds better than the original.
Check it out:
So… what are you listening to?
I had no idea this was not a Springsteen song.
Jimmy Cliff doesn’t get a third of the airplay he deserves.
This is false. Had you instead said “outside of a certain mediocre cover of a Johnny Nash song, Jimmy Cliff does not get one tenth the airplay he deserves,” however, you would have been making a statement of verifiable scientific fact.
I don’t count that song.
Nor should you.
Mack the Knife is a good example of a song where the subsequent coverers have mostly covered covers.
The original is from a Brecht play. Louis Armstrong’s version was directly based on the English translation of the play, Bobby Darin covered Armstrong, and since then most performers have been covering Darin.
Many of the Beatles covers are better than the original. The Who’s cover of Summertime Blues is essential. Pretty much everyone who covers Hallelujah covers the John Cale version. Even Leonard Cohen does that at times.
Then there are really lame covers like the Kinks version of Louie, Louie, where you can understand the words.
I can think of several off the top of my head.
In addition to “Mack the Knife,” Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” is the best-known version of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” in the English-speaking world. He also recorded a version of “Happy” that blew Michael Jackson’s out of the water. Ditto most of his Tim Hardin covers. Come to think of it, I can probably think of dozens of covers by Bobby Darin alone that are better than the original.
Johnny Cash had a huge hit with “Ring of Fire” while Anita Carter’s original languished in obscurity. I like his cover of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” better than the original, too.
The original version of “Without You” was by Badfinger, not Harry Nilsson, though they weren’t really different enough from each other to say which one Mariah Carey covered.
I wouldn’t say that the Bette Midler cover of “Wind Beneath My Wings” and the Whitney Houston cover of “I Will Always Love You” were better than the originals by Gary Morris and Dolly Parton, but they certainly sold better.
Though I’m partial to Al Hibbler’s (quasi-)original, the Righteous Brothers’ cover of Unchained Melody is generally regarded as the canonical version. “Ebb Tide,” too.
And have you heard the original version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Louis Prima? Doesn’t hold a candle to Benny Goodman’s version.
“Rhinestone Cowboy” was not first recorded by Glen Campbell.
In Japan, Iruka’s cover of “Nagoriyuki” was a much bigger hit than the original by Kaguya Hime. Likewise Rimi Natsukawa’s cover of “Nada Sousou.”
Speaking of Japanese songs, 4 PM’s cover of “Sukiyaki” was based on the cover by A Taste of Honey, but that’s probably just because it was the first English version. Both were inferior to the original, but it’s a cover of a cover.
The Animals’ cover of “The House of the Rising Sun” is generally regarded as the canonical version.
When the cover is so much better than the original, it doesn’t usually allow for someone to cover *THAT* version, though.
When the cover becomes canonical, there’s usually no place left to go… either that cover is left as a testament or that cover becomes the song that people cover but no one can improve upon.
The Mack the Knife song, though, that would make for an interesting study…
What’s fun is the new versions that use different lyrics. The original german lyrics were rather dark, and the translation that Armstrong and Darin use is pretty tame. Some of the translations for more recent english-language stage productions are more gruesome, though rarely performed as stand-alone songs.
Also, my own version (which doens’t conform to the structure of the original):
The shark is a dangerous creature
For it has the sharpest of teeth
But those teeth are in view
And the same is not true
Of the knife that belongs to MacHeath
Awesome.
There are probably more of these than we know of. Sometimes covers do so much better than the originals that most people don’t even know they’re covers.
I have a friend with whom I was eating, one day, and the Vanessa Carlton/Counting Crows cover of Big Yellow Taxi came on the radio.
He said “They’re covering Amy Grant songs now???”
He was not kidding, much to my chagrin.
I haven’t seen anyone say the obvious one (though maybe I missed it), but the Aretha version of Respect is the canonical version, not the original Otis Redding – and she certainly made it her own.
Here’s one: Hans Leo Hassler’s “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret” became a passage in Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, and also the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” One of these was reworked by Paul Simon as “American Tune,” which was itself covered by the Dave Matthews Band, among others.
This. Comment. Is. So. Awesome.
Thank you. I am off to track these proto American Tunes down.
Ooooh, nice one.