Uncovered - the original version

Not sure if anyone has done this one yet.

Blondie's 'Hanging On The Telephone' is not the original - which was written and recorded a couple of years earlier by The Nerves


This video contains both back to back.

This was the first track I ever heard by ...And You Will Know By The Trail Of Dead. It struck me as weirdly and coolly original.



So it was a bit of a surprise to find out it was a cover of Guided By Voices maybe a decade later.



Trail Of Dead wins for mine.

I shouldn't be surprised that what I thought was the Moody Blues first hit (1967?) was a cover of Bessie Banks 1963 original Go Now
Original

Cover

Holy crap! I Got You by James Brown is a cover!

Well sort of. James Brown wrote it but the first recording (in 1962) was by his band with Yvonne Fair on vocals - with a slightly differen title "I Found You"

Kenny Rogers did the third recording of "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town"! In 1969
Johnny Darrell had the first charting recording in 1967
But Waylon Jennings had the first recording in 1966. Weirdly the song's write, Mel Tillis, didn't record his own version until 1967, after Johnny Darrell's version got to no.9 on the US country charts
Johnny Darrell 1967:


Waylon Jennings 1966:

Jeff Simmons came up on random with this song/album title "Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up" - which until now I had assumed was a Frank Zappa original (from Joe's Garage Act 1)



Of course Simmons was a member of the Mothers and Zappa played guitar on the recording.
Zappa's (quite different) version:

I guess Americans of a certain age know this, but I didn't. Barbara-Ann is not a Beach Boys original, The Regents recorded it in 1961 (with a sax solo).



I kinda miss the ashtray solo

I just heard what I throught was the original, but it turns out it was the second version of what I'd though was a Salt n Pepa original

Lynda Lyndell's original 'What A Man' (she retreated from the music biz for 25 years after threats from the KKK for working with black musicians)



The Laurel Lee version I just heard



The version I thought was an original

I've long loved the album 801 Live and the track RongWrong had a lot to do with my early approach to learning to play bass - I thought Bill MacCormick's playing was very tasteful - and central rather than background. I'd assumed it was an Eno or Eno/Mazanera collab (really I'd never thought about about it - it just sounded nice)


Now I'm reading Eno's Biography 'On Some Faraway Beach) and discovered that it as actually written by Charles Hayward the drummer/vocalist from Quiet Sun, a band that broke up without recording anything when their guitarist (Phil Manzanera) left to join Roxy Music. A few years later Brian Eno had left Roxy Music and the rest of Roxy was in hiatus while Bryan Ferry worked on solo stuff and Quiet Sun reformed (including bassist Bill MacCormick) to record the stuff they had written and worked on before Manzanera left. Eno turned up to the sessions (as Manzanera's friend) and he's credited with his usual 'treatments'.

I don't know how he turned the original below into the cover above (althought MacCormick's preformatve bass line is present in the middle section)

This is the original