There is a phenomenon in pop culture that has bemused me ever since I was a little kid. It’s the relationship between the famous cover version of a song and the sincere original recording by the songwriter.<\/p>\n
There are so many songs that have become iconic, sung by someone channeling someone else’s personal experience. At some point I started to track them down.<\/p>\n
In some cases I had heard the original first. For example, I still associated “Angel from Montgomery” with John Prine, even though the cover by Bonnie Raitt has become iconic.<\/p>\n
Even when the cover version is pure genius — such as Harry Nilsson’s cover of “Everybody’s Talkin'”, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the original version by Fred Neil, who wrote it — and you can tell.<\/p>\n
In some cases, a great singer\/songwriter can boost the career of a pop singer by giving them the material for a definitive cover version. That’s certainly the case for Dolly Parton’s brilliant song “I Will Always Love You”, famously covered by Whitney Houston.<\/p>\n
And much as I love Janis Joplin’s cover of “Me and Bobby McGee”, I still prefer hearing Kris Kristofferson’s version, knowing that he wrote it. The same goes for Joni Mitchell’s original version of “Woodstock”, even though the cover by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young became the anthem for a generation.<\/p>\n
And don’t even get me started on Jimmy Webb. Just listen once to his original version of “All I Know”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman” or “Galveston”, and you might end up renouncing cover versions forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a phenomenon in pop culture that has bemused me ever since I was a little kid. It’s the relationship between the famous cover version of a song and the sincere original recording by the songwriter. There are so many songs that have become iconic, sung by someone channeling someone else’s personal experience. At … Continue reading “Before the cover version”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23630,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629\/revisions\/23630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}