http://mentalfloss.com/article/53336/20-songs-you-might-not-know-were-covers

I am very surprised they didn’t include The Twist!

The original by Hank Ballard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5jDVbY7a7U

The cover by Chubby Checker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqVFJNcQ4X0

Or Elvira

The original by Dallas Frazier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wjevGsrCEc

The cover by The Oak Ridge Boys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVHQsmIaDBY

Thanks Mike,

That was very interesting.

Always on My Mind

elvis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF5fW3-9DeI

willie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fn9b_s8Iew

+1 for the twist

i would suggest pat boone's efforts exemplify covers gone wrong though if they made the original artist or composer money......

I put forth this:

Maybe the "right" or "wrong" of a performance is a matter only of the listener's own *perception* of what they expect.

Not that I dig on Boone's work all that much, Elvis neither for that matter, Willie I can take in measured doses, but sales numbers certainly show that quite a few must have dug all three.

The song in question here makes for a jazz ballad, too, and I can dig that.



Somethin' fer everybody.


--Mac

+1 on The Twist, IMHO Hank Ballard and the Midnighters don't get the recognition they deserve.

Notes:

1 = original
2 or 3 = covers although there may have been many other versions don between 1, 2 and/or 3

Walk, Don't Run
1) Johnny Smith
2) The Ventures

Try A Little Tenderness
1) Ray Noble Orchestra w/Val Rosing vocals
2) Otis Redding
3) Otis Redding arrangement done by 3 Dog nIGht

Blueberry Hill
1) Gene Autry
2) Fats Domino

At Last
1) Glenn Miller
2) Etta James

Love Potion #9
1) Clovers
2) Coasters
3) Searchers

and while we are on The Clovers

Your Cash Ain't Nothin' But Trash
1) Clovers
2) Steve Miller Band

and while we are talkin' 'bout Steve Miller

Jet Airliner
1) Paul Pena
2) Steve Miller

Fever
1) Little Willie John
2) Peggy Lee

That's Life
1) Marion Montgomery
2) Frank Sinatra

Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody Medley
1) Louis Prima
2) David Lee Roth

(Just A Gigolo original by Damia in French, Fats Waller in English - I Ain't Got Nobody original by Marion Harris)

There are tons more, but I'll leave them for others.

Insights and incites by NOtes

Walk, Don't Run
1) Johnny Smith
2) The Ventures

That's a good one. I heard the Johnny Smith recording decades after I had heard the venture's cover.

I like the Johnny Smith version so much better that I now think the Ventures pretty much ruined it.

The Ventures changed the feel didn't include the counterpoint... They really dumbed it down. Listen to them one after another.

Isn't it true that for the majority of popular RECORDED/BROADCAST music up to perhaps the mid 1960's, the persons that are known for the popular versions of the songs, were not usually those who penned the song? Tin Pan Alley and all that?

My understanding was that the singer/songwriter influx of the 1960's started to change the face of who was actually being recorded? From my limited understanding of the recording industry history, good ol' Bob Dylan being recorded, with his croaking voice, singing all of his own songs, was kind of an anomaly and quite a risk by the recording company executives. The popularity of that first Dylan album began to shift this from the performer to the writer to the writer/performer as the same person/entity.

I think this is also at the root of the 'collapse of the music industry' thread, that people who expect to be paid to play/sing other writer's music point to the lack of opportunities for such as a collapse.

Weren't MOST of the hits by Sinatra, Doris Day, and contemporaries of popular singers, written by other people, in effect, 'covers'?

To tack on to my previous comment.

While DJs are derided here as being non-musicians, perhaps they serve a modern function of the 'cover singer(Sinatra, Day, etc.)' of old in a way - taking an existing song and changing the feel, the order of sections, etc. to render a potentially more popular version of the song.

Now there are a sprinkling staged 'crossover' renderings of songs as well, where you might see an R&B artist covering a Country tune or vice versa, but not nearly as much as what I understand from the past; where record companies scrambled to get their own artists to record the popular published songs of the day.

Chet Atkins simplified it with the permission of Johnny Smith (he played it to him and asked if he could record it). Even Chet Atkins' version was too difficult for the Ventures and they simplified it even more. And then came "The Shadows"... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46rHsD0onsU)

Guido

When my son brought home "Hard To Handle" by the Black Crowes and I started singing it, he was stunned that I knew the tune. I told him then that it was an Otis Redding song. Later, Ray

The fatcats don't change their stripes over trends.

If I remember the year correctly, and I should, since this happened just as I thought I was entering a nice career as a session musician, in 1977 the Musician's Union in the US ordered a strike. I think the head of the union's name at the time was Sullivan, again memory may be wrong.

But what I do remember was the end result of that strike.

The agreement stipulated that if someone performed on a recording release, their name must be listed on the official recording roster as well as the on the liner notes.

That meant that they were then eligible for royalties.

It also spelled the death of the great and lesser studio session bands.

As Carol Kaye wrote, paraphrased, there was a time when she enjoyed the same kind of yearly income as a medical doctor from her salary working as a studio session musician. Those days went away, at least in the US, during the late 70s, because of that strike and the "agreement" that one man in charge at the time made, the scuttlebutt was that he did not ask any of the musicians about it, just went ahead and did it. There was lots of griping, the kind of griping that only musicians can do. THAT part I remember quite well, as I was one of the gripers. And then some.

Note: I tried to websearch for a citation on the above, believe it or not, could not find a single entry about musician's strike in 1977, in "the 70s" or the likes even though I poured through several page returns of each search term and more. That alone can make one rather suspicious.


--Mac

Before Bob Dylan, The Beatles and others it was quite common for song writers to write songs and performers to play them.

While I have nothing against a good singer/songwriter, I think the fact that you pretty much HAD to write your own songs damaged the music industry.

Great song writers are not always great singers and great singers are not always great song writers.

It's too bad the recording industry decided that the two modes couldn't coexist.

From Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building to the composer at Stax and Motown, and so on, great songwriters wrote the American Songbook. I could list 100 names that penned thousands of classic songs here but if you look at the song credits of the classics, you'll see them again and again and again.

Insights and incites by Notes

Actually, Bob Dylan did use session musicians for his definitive 60s recordings as backup.

The Band is likely the most famous iteration, but even before that, circa '65 or so IIRC, the musician lineup for his recordings, including the famous/infamous "basement recordings" consisted of good and practiced musicians who were able to quick study and turn out usable results. And that's a Session Cat, regardless of the business/contractual arrangement.

As for The Beatles, we will likely never know how many "fifth Beatles" there really are (How about the entire London Symphony for starters? On order from Government, no less.).


--Mac

My point in raising Dylan was based on a Dylan documentary that I believe was on PBS, that highlighted the producer at Columbia that really stepped out on a limb and signed Dylan - with his nearly absent singing capability. This particular documentary spoke quite a bit about how most popular recorded SINGERS of the day, were usually not songwriters themselves. They were told 'here, sing this, we're going to make a hit record from it'. I hadn't really considered this until seeing that documentary. Here's a link to the website for the documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/bob-dylan/about-the-film/574/

Some of you might poo-poo my being educated in this manner, but I really had no interest in the topic of songwriters writing for the pop music machine before watching this film. Maybe Dylan wasn't the first where the songwriter was who was recorded by the record companies, but this movie seems to emphasize that point - at least for a major label like Columbia. They actually spend quite a bit of time talking about the producer. I think it's this guy: John Hammond: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Hammond

My understanding was that up to that point in time, most branches of music, including Rock, had 'pretty voice' singers, even if their technique caused tremors to vocal teachers. Not having lived through Roy Orbison's heavy popularity, I'm guessing the fans parents and teachers had probably not too many nice things to say about Orbison, or Elvis (This is of course pretty well documented), doo-[*****] groups, etc.

I'm probably younger by 10-15 years (46) of most of the thread participants here, and my choir teacher in HS railed on and on about how Sinatra ruined popular music with all of his slides into and out of notes. But he did acknowledge he enjoyed Sinatra's tone.

So, the main point of my post was that wasn't it more the rule than the exception that popular recorded and broadcast music wasn't written by the performer?

My reply was to Bob's post, not yours.

I agree that Dylan helped to escort in the modern recording company use of the aongwriter as the performer again.

I use the term, "agsin" simply because the history of recording is rife with the same, referencing great songwriter/performers such as Louis Jordan's successes, there are, of course, many others.

The recording industry of the 50's - 60's era had indeed lost sight of this aspect.

However, my point was not anything at all to do with that particular subject, since this thread is about the use of session musicians in the creation or production of recorded works.

And Dylan's works you cite did indeed include backing musicians of this type, and that definitely had a lot to do with the success of the projects.


--Mac

.
>>>...Actually, Bob Dylan did use session musicians for his definitive 60s recordings as backup. ..>>>

Dylan worked as a session musician himself. As far as I know, it was only one song on one album for one artist. I learned this accidentally - my parents had the album when I was young. This would have been around 1965, maybe.

So here is a trivia question for you: what is the name of the album, the song and the artist on the cover of the album played as a session musician?

Carolyn Hester – Columbia Cl 1796 (1962)

Bob Dylan harmonica
I'll fly away
Swing and turn jubilee
Come back baby

Apparently his first recording was with Harry Belafonte on Midnight Special, also playing harmonica.

Mac, I'm well aware of the great Louis Jordan and in his era songwriter/singers were definitely a presence, but I think they were the minority, as the extension of Tin Pan Alley wrote most of the popular songs.

Whether it was Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, Irving Mills, the Gershwin Brothers, Lerner & Lowe, Rogers & Hart and so on, my impression is that the majority of pop songs were recorded by performers and written by professional songwriters.

This extended into the early Rock Era with the extension of the Brill Building era and all the wonderful songwriters like Leiber & Stoller, King & Goffin, Otis Blackwell, Doc Pomus, Willie Dixon, Hayes & Porter, Mann & Weil and so on.

During all these eras the professional songwriter and the professional singers of mainstream pop music were the majority, but coexisted with the singer/songwriter combination. And it didn't seem important that Sinatra or Presley didn't write their songs and others did.

R&B, Folk, and C&W seemed to be the exception that was largely populated by the singer/songwriter.

Then after Dylan, the media machine seemed to put importance on the fact that the pop artist should also be the songwriter.

Ironically modern country music (which I refer to as Nashville to differentiate it from "real" country) is now populated largely by professional songwriters and singers.

I'm not trying to make a point here, because I don't know what the significance of that is (if any). But just a passing observation on my part from my limited experience as a performer and an interested person and not a researcher.

Insights and incites by Notes

Thinking that a particular event must surely be in the majority and actually adding up the figures turn out to often be entirely contradictory, Bob.

The list of known and famous Singer/Songwriters alone in the US and Great Britain only is too long to post here, so I will refer to the wickedpedia page on that subject. Do note all the other countries entries as well.

Anyway, I contend that the list of singers who are also the songwriters is the majority from this data. (And, I see that the wickedpedia list is also incomplete as well -- none other than Louis Jordan is not there, for one example. So this list can only be even bigger than it is at present. )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_singer-songwriters

Also bear in mind that this list is solely comprised of "singer"-songwriter, it does not even address all the Instrumentalists that in my way of thinking, also made recordings, many of which can be easily categorized as "hits" and therefore should fall into the total count since we are discussing the difference between "cover" recording works and "original performed by artist" recording works.


--Mac

Very good point Mac.

Perhaps I'm just mourning the great stuff that came out of a songwriter's community like existed in the Brill Building.

Notes

Since I figure I lost out on first (and last) fulltime studio session job due to that strike situation in the late 70s, I tend to "mourn" the situation in a way, too, Bob.

They had just offered me an unbelievable (to me at that time) salary and then...

It was on to the jingle shops. And less pay.


--Mac

I feel your pain.

While on the road in the 1960s, we were Berry Gordy's first choice to become Motown's first white band to bust into the top 40.

Bob Seger was making #1 records in Detroit, and Berry the businessman figured he needed something to recapture the #1 slot in Detroit radio that he had held on to for so long.

We didn't feel any racism, it was just business. Everybody treated everybody there without regard to ethnicity - just personality.

At the time I was making $200 per show to play about an hour and a half, and was doing two a week for $400. A journeyman electrician at the time made about $100/week.

For about a half year we had been warming up for major acts and treated as peers by the likes of Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker, Rick Derringer, Bob Seger, Eric Burdon, The Association, The Four Seasons, and so many others.

Our manager hired music biz lawyers to negotiate our terms. The offers on our side of the table kept getting smaller and smaller and Motown who was holding the cards stood firm. They wanted us to record for union scale and no royalties after the recording and promotional costs were paid back.

We did cut a couple of instrumental tracks for scale, and I don't know if any vocals were ever added, if they were, they didn't get airplay. Could be on an album cut for someone, could have been put in the circular file.

Then one day Motown quit talking to us and hired their second choice, "The Sunliners" who eventually became "Rare Earth".

Our band broke up and I went back to being in a cover band and instead of $400 for a 3 hour work week, it was back to $90/week for 6 nights, 5 hours per night in a singles bar.

In hindsight, we should have done it for scale and made the connections that could have led to better things. But we were teenagers and didn't know anything about that. I'm sure the lawyers did their best but made the wrong guess as to when Motown's lawyers would just quit calling or returning calls.

Such is life.

Some disappointment in that, so watching the Funk Brothers movie was bittersweet. But no regrets. At the time I was rolling in the dough, playing music with the big stars as an equal, and had beautiful females wanting me. What more to life is there?

And I've had a happy life since.

Well at least I don't have to worry about being a "has been".

Notes

There is a BBC documentary "From the Byrds to the Eagles" that discusses the growing popularity of the singer/songwriter. I really enjoyed it, check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-DQVF7oL6c&list=PLE5ovHLJjVc-fItKrRlC6h8D0oxsekRXW

.
I stand corrected. I had meant the Belafonte album. I thought it was Dylan's only studio session. Seems I was wrong about that.

We can tell something about Mr. Zimmerman's performance as a Session Player from the number of times he managed to obtain repeat work as such...



--Mac