Kin: Cry Little Sister

Gerard McMann: Cry Little Sister

[purchase]

It's Black Friday here in the U.S., and what better music to celebrate it than a nice organ-filled, creepy-kids-choir'd goth rock tune, eh? Okay, I know it's not supposed to mean that kind of Black Friday. I remain unconvinced. Me, I'm staying home today and writing blogs like a sensible 21st century gal.

This song was the theme of the 1987 American teen horror film The Lost Boys. For benefit of us Americans, Gerard used the name "McMann" on the soundtrack, since he thought we'd have a tough time with "McMahan", his real name. It's not that we don't pay attention to these sorts of nuances; we're just seriously sleep-deprived from all this 3 AM shopping. We're zombi-i-i-e-e-es!

Kin: Your Daughters and Your Sons

Dick Gaughan: Your Daughters and Your Sons

[purchase]

The Duhks: Your Daughters and Your Sons

[purchase]

Two favorite versions of a well-covered tune by Irish folk troubadour Tommy Sands, who tends towards the political, and sure enough: its litany of international struggles for rights and recognition is capped effectively by the reminder that, though strife and hard times often follow those who fight for justice with their art, their work, and their lives, the seeds they've sown in their progeny is ample evidence of the change that they fought for. The second person delivery only serves to drive it home harder, making it clear that, though we may not see the fruits of our own labors either, the rewards of social justice are no less effective for being the beginnings of a multi-generational process of protest, absorption, acceptance, adoption, and - eventually - peace.

Kin: The Cobbler’s Daughter

Kate Rusby: The Cobbler‘s Daughter

[purchase, priced in British pounds]

Kate Rusby is surely one of the leading voices of English folk music. The Cobbler’s Daughter comes from Rusby’s 1999 album Sleepless, which was her breakthrough album. Sleepless was nominated for a Mercury Prize. The Mercury Prize is the British equivalent of a Grammy. The Mercury goes to the best album of the year, and folk albums are almost never considered. But Rusby is that good.

As far as I can tell, The Cobbler’s Daughter is a traditional song. I can not find any recording of it before Rusby’s, however, and the song seems like a modern twist on a situation that often occurs in traditional songs of the British Isles. A beautiful young maiden catches the eye of a young man who then comes to court her. In traditional songs, it is assumed that she will fall in love with him in turn, and their love will either lead to tragedy, or it will overcome all obstacles, and the song will end happily. Rusby gives the young maiden a choice in the matter, and love goes off the rails from there. I’ll let you discover the rest for yourself.

Kin: Little Mother-in-Law

Squirrel Nut Zippers: Little Mother-in-Law

[purchase used]

An odd little Hawaiian-esque acoustic number complete with slack key, uke, brush and holler from the kings of the zoot suit swing revival, recorded in their demo years, rereleased on Merge Records via a limited edition EP when the band got big in the late nineties, and now long out of print.

The titular mother-in-law actually appears to be the narrator's mother, best as I can tell - but like so much of their work, this one really isn't about the lyrics, it's about the mood.

Kin: I'm My Own Grandpa

Lonzo and Oscar: I'm My Own Grandpa

[purchase]

It may sound like material for a Jerry Springer episode, but the roots of I’m My Own Grandpa reside in Mark Twain, who once showed that it was possible to be one’s own grandfather (though he most likely lifted the idea from early sources). Twain’s story inspired one Dwight Latham, member of 1930s novelty and comedy band The Jesters, to co-write with Tin Pan Alley resident Moe Jaffe a song about the cartwheeling genealogy which would make for interesting family reunions. It was first recorded in 1947 by country-jokers Lonzo & Oscar (Oscar, whose real name is Rollin Lillian Sullivan, is still alive at 91).

Almost half a century after the song first was released, Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith and their respective son and mother tried to put the theory to the test, but in so half-assed a way that nobody really cared.

Let's give a warm SMM welcome to our guest poster, Any Major Dude With Half A Heart, whose blog I've loved for quite a while. Thanks!

Kin: Sister Madly

Crowded House: Sister Madly

[purchase]

One of the most popular bands of the 1980s was The Stray Cats, with their slightly punked-up take on rockabilly. As a result, a lot of musicians tried out a rockabilly sound, at least for a song or two. Many of these have been forgotten, as they should be. But Sister Madly was Crowded House’s take on it. The song swings appropriately, but it also has touches that sound only like Crowded House. For me, this one stands up.

Neil Finn wrote this one when he was awakened by his sister having a nightmare. The guitar solo is by Richard Thompson.

Kin: Walt Whitman's Niece

Billy Bragg & Wilco: Walt Whitman's Niece

[purchase]

As a listener and blogger, I tend to favor a focus on history, production and musicality over text. From that perspective, today's song is easy to present: penned by Woody Guthrie fifty years before it was set to music and recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco on their Grammy-nominated Mermaid Avenue collection, Walt Whitman's Niece is a fun rockabilly stomper that recounts a based-on-fact narrative of a night with a seaman friend and some girls. Period.

But as a teacher of English and Communications, trained in poetic parsing, it's hard not to notice the concrete power of the text here. These are heavily down-to-earth lyrics, with the first two verses constructed of structurally consistent couplets of event-oriented plot lines paired with self-aware lines protecting the anonymity of the people and places involved, ad infinitum, until we reach absurdity of not even being able to know which rug they lie on, which stairs they climbed to get there, which book of poems the unnamed seaman and narrator heard from the unnamed girls of the titular lyric.

If that were all he wrote, then the song would be an interesting exercise, nothing more. But perhaps not surprisingly for those who recognize the literate poetic genius of Guthrie himself, in that it reads a bit like a Whitman poem, especially at the end, the lyrical structure belies the crypticism of the words it contains. Here's verse three of three in its entirety, a testament to both the project and the poet it pays tribute to:

My seaman buddy and girl moved off
after a couple of pages and there I was,
All night long, laying and listening
and forgetting the poems.
And as well as I could recall
or my seaman buddy could recollect,
My girl had told us that she was a niece,
of Walt Whitman, but not which niece,
And it takes a night and a girl
and a book of this kind
A long long time to find its way back

Kin: Earth to Grandma

Ass Ponys: Earth to Grandma

[Purchase]

In the grand scheme of the music world, there sure aren't a lot of homages to dear ol' Grams. This contribution from rock band Ass Ponys is mostly just a list of the kooky stuff that so many grandma's seem to like to make and give to others that makes everyone else think "what the heck is this and why would anyone want one?". So this is more an homage to the crazy kitch crafty world of dear old granny and her ilk than to the lady herself.

It makes me smile, but then again, my grandma never made me anything out of popsicle sticks.

Kin: Aunt Avis

Vic Chesnutt: Aunt Avis

[purchase]

Widespread panic w/ Vic Chesnutt: Aunt Avis

[purchase]

Left a paraplegic after a car accident in his teens, celebrated but never-famous singer-songwriter and collaborator Vic Chesnutt struggled with depression up until Christmas of last year, when he passed at the age of 45 due to complications following an overdose.

In the year since, I've delved much deeper into his work, and though his stark realism sticks to the soul if you let it, it's well worth the trip to hell and back.

Take Aunt Avis, for example, a plea to Vic's ancestors to save him from himself. The original is shaky and sparse, the jamband version with Widespread Panic eerier and dark. But both bear the self-depreciating humor and cynical grit which made Chesnutt a darling of the post-grunge underground. And the suicide-note lyrics? The plaintive cry of the vocal? Aunt Avis is dead, and so is her nephew: whether that makes the song that much more prescient, or merely a promise fulfilled, is a question best left open to discussion.

Kin: Daddy

Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Daddy

[purchase]

If there were a more disturbing song recorded by ELP I haven't heard it yet. In Daddy, we hear the story of a father's worse nightmare: the loss of a child. The song was written in 1993 in memory and to raise awareness of Sara Anne Wood who went missing riding her bike home from summer Bible School less than one mile from her home in Frankfort, New York on August 18 of the same year. Her body has never been found. Three years after Sara was last seen, a suspect was brought to trail and was convicted, even though after his confession he recanted. He was also a suspect in the disappearance of at least four other children. I don't think his name is worth mentioning here because this is for Sara and for anyone else who has been touched by such a horrible crime.

Other People’s Songs/ Kin: Me and My Uncle

Judy Collins: Me and My Uncle

[purchase]

An entire day went by with our new theme, and no one posted. I wanted to, but I was waiting to see if anyone had a transition song for us. That’s where a song fits both our old theme and our new one. I was drawing blanks. Well, life goes on. After a full day, I decided to get things started with one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, Me and My Uncle. Just for the heck of it, I decided to make sure that I knew who wrote it. I got quite a surprise, and a great story, which comes from the Grateful Dead Lyric & Song Finder. It turns out that Me and My Uncle was written, kind of by accident, by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. How do you write a song by accident? Here’s the story:

John often used to tell the story behind "Me and My Uncle." Years ago he began receiving publishing royalties from a song on a Judy Collins record with which he was unfamiliar. It was titled "Me and My Uncle". He called Judy to let her know of the mistake because he hadn't written any such song. She laughed and told him that about a year before, in Arizona after one of her concerts, they had a 'Tequila Night' back at the hotel with Stephen Stills, Neil Young and a few others. They were running a blank cassette and John proceeded to write "Me and My Uncle" on the spot. The next day, John woke up to the tequila sunrise with no recollection of the songwriting incident. Judy kept the cassette from that evening and then, without informing John, recorded the song for her own record. Over the years the song was recorded by several people, and eventually became a standard of the Grateful Dead. John used to joke that, little by little, with each royalty check, the memory of writing the song would come back to him.

And that’s also why I wound up with Judy Collins, and not the Grateful Dead.

Other People's Songs: A World Without Love

Peter & Gordon: A World Without Love

[purchase]

You know you're a top-drawer songwriter when even your rejects make #1 hits for someone else. This someone else was lucky enough to be the brother of the songwriter's girlfriend. The songwriter was Paul McCartney, who deemed this song not quite good enough for the Beatles. Lucky Peter. He also got "Nobody I Know" from Paul as well.

Other People’s Songs: Mercy Mercy Mercy

Cannonball Adderley: Mercy Mercy Mercy

[purchase]

Joe Zawinul started his recording career as a bandleader in 1959, but he was soon working as a sideman. By 1966, Zawinul had been with Cannonball Adderley for five years. That was when he wrote Mercy Mercy Mercy. This was the rare jazz song to hit the pop charts, peaking at #11. Zawinul was a pioneer in the use of electronic keyboards in jazz; in this case, it is the electric piano.

The song became a jazz standard. But something else happened as well. The song acquired words somewhere, and was recorded by such artists as The Buckinghams and, later, Phillip Bailey of Earth Wind & Fire. Queen Latifah recorded a version with a different set of lyrics. And finally, Joe Zawinul, coming off a highly successful tenure in Weather Report, recorded a version as a leader, also with vocals. But, for me and many others, the original recording of Mercy Mercy Mercy will always be the real one.

Other People's Songs: Superstar - Delta Lady

Rita Coolidge: Superstar

[purchase]

Joe Cocker: Delta Lady

[purchase]

This explanation will read more like Six Degrees of Separation than a normal musical post. Let's see if I can get us through the maze.

Leon Russell began his career as a 60's session musician and songwriter. Sometime around 1969, he was an integral member of Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, a transient group made up of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett plus or minus George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Dave Mason, Booker T. Jones, Isaac Hayes, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Keltner, Rita Coolidge, and a boatload of other musicians. Together Russell and Bonnie wrote "Superstar," an unnoticed B-side single for Delaney and Bonnie in 1969.

In early 1970, Russell went on to produce Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, and he's featured soloing on several tunes on the very successful live album. As was Rita Coolidge, who does a bust-up job on "Superstar". Even so, you are probably most familiar with The Carpenters' 1971 version. Richard Carpenter, though, had heard neither Bonnie's or Rita's version, but instead caught it on a TV show performance by a then-new vocalist, Bette Midler.

Meanwhile, in this fertile period of cross-collaboration, Leon Russell also wrote a song about the aforementioned Coolidge, at the time nicknamed "Delta Lady". Cocker picked up that song and made it a hit in 1969. Leon recorded his own version a year later.

Other People's Songs: You Don't Know Like I Know

Sam & Dave: You Don't Know Like I Know


[purchase]

Before Chef, before Shaft, and before his 18-minute version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", Isaac Hayes was half of a potent Stax songwriting/producing duo with David Porter. Soul singers Sam & Dave were the prime beneficiary of their talents, having been gifted with classics like "Hold On, I'm Comin'", "When Something is Wrong with My Baby", and most notably "Soul Man". The first hit the duo had with Hayes & Porter was "You Don't Know Like I Know", which went to #7 on the black singles charts in March of 1966. It started a string of ten consecutive Top Twenty R&B hits for them.

In 1968 Hayes recorded his first album, which bombed. But his second album, Hot Buttered Soul (the one with the 18-minute version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix") was the first in a series of hit albums that made him a star in his own right.

Incidentally, Porter also became a recording artist, but never achieved anything approaching Hayes' success.

Other People’s Songs: Spoonful

Howlin‘ Wolf: Spoonful

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Here is my audacious statement of the week: Willie Dixon was as important to the classic sound of Chicago blues as Muddy Waters. That’s because you can’t look at the best work of any of the Chicago greats without finding a song that Willie Dixon wrote, and possibly produced. We heard Wang Dang Doodle here during nonsense week; that’s a Dixon tune. Willie Dixon became a house songwriter, producer, and studio musician, at Chess Records in the 1950s and early 60s. So just about anyone who went through Chess played some of his tunes. Some, like Spoonful, became signature tunes for the first artist who recorded them, in this case Howlin’ Wolf.

I’m stretching the definition of our theme a bit with this one. Yes, Howlin’ Wolf was the original artist, and yes, the song’s author, Willie Dixon, would later record the song under his own name. But Willie Dixon also plays bass on Howlin’ Wolf’s original version. So, even though Dixon’s later recording has him singing the song for the first time, he was more than just a bystander here. But I wanted to pay tribute to Dixon this week, and I don’t have a complete discography for all of the songs he wrote for others. So this is my solution. I hope nobody minds.

Other People's Songs: All The Young Dudes

Mott The Hoople: All The Young Dudes

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David Bowie wrote All The Young Dudes for Mott The Hoople when Mott was struggling to place something on the charts. It was to the point of them throwing in the towel but Bowie and Hoople bassist Peter Watts got to talking and Bowie offered them Suffragette City. Mott rejected that so Bowie came up with All The Young Dudes. The song became a signature glam rock tune but Bowie later said the song was intended to speak to the coming apocalypse, much in the same way as Bowie's song Five Years. Rolling Stone rated the song as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and it is also one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

Other People's Songs: It's A Shame

The Spinners: It's a Shame

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Some week's theme's are pretty binary, and a song pretty clearly falls in or out of the box – songs from 1991, songs beginning with "you", songs with handclaps. This week is a little more challenging and the box has very fuzzy boundaries, so I'm playing it safe. Stevie Wonder, Syreeta Wright and Lee Garrett, all three artists in their own right, co-wrote and produced this song for label-mates the Spinners. After seven years plugging away for Berry Gordy's Motown label, the Spinners finally had their biggest hit to date. Two years later, they switched to Atlantic records, and producer/songwriter Thom Bell (remember him from the Delfonics post?) helped them achieve a string of 70's R&B/soul hits.

Other People’s Songs: Crazy

Patsy Cline: Crazy

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In 1961, Willie Nelson was hardly a household name. He was one of any number of Nashville songwriters who labored anonymously behind the scenes, hoping for a hit. Writing a hit single could often be the only way to get the chance to record an album of your own. Early 1961 found Nelson working on a song called Stupid. Nelson had the song in mind for a male singer. As he got close to finishing the song, Nelson changed the name to Crazy. One more thing had to fall into place. The singer Nelson had in mind turned the song down, and someone got it to Patsy Cline. Not only a hit, but a classic song was born, and Nelson was one his way to having his own recording career. But it would still be many years before Nelson would record his own version of Crazy, and Cline’s version has never been matched, not even by the song’s author.

Mononymic Artists -> Other People's Songs: Nico's These Days

Nico: These Days

[purchase]

Though I have it listed in my archives as a Jackson Browne cover, this 1967 song is actually the original recording, written by a sixteen-year-old Browne for the mononymic Nico to record, with Browne on acoustic guitar and Velvet Underground chums Cale and Reed on everything else...and only later taken back by the songwriter, as his stature as a performer began to truly take off. As such, as I noted over at Cover Lay Down back in May of 2008,

cover versions of These Days tend to fall into two camps: those that cover Nico, and those that cover Jackson Browne. The former seem more popular among a certain indiefolk crowd, especially after her version lent hipster cred to the soundtrack for The Royal Tannenbaums, calling us back to its fragile, anxious, somewhat spacey sound; you can hear the secondhand influence of Nico in more recent covers from fringefolkers Kathryn Williams, St. Vincent, and Mates of State. Meanwhile, fellow seventies icons Gregg Allman and Kate Wolf clearly have Browne’s slow, simple poetics and clear, open-hearted delivery in mind; so, a generation later, do relative newcomers Denison Witmer, Fountains of Wayne, and Tyler Ramsey.

But as others have pointed out long before me, the bifurcated trunk of the musical tree that is These Days versions is relevant to an evolution of song not only because of the curious history, but because the choices made in each version affect the meaning of the song. And here we are not just talking musical interpretation, either: Nico’s version is lyrically different as well as musicially distinct, and the lost second-person subject of the penultimate line, the focus on belief (I don’t think I’ll risk another) over feeling (It’s so hard to risk another), changes the narrator into someone more narcissistic, less historied, and — some believe — less believable overall.

Our new theme this week is a bit tricky to define precisely - we're not looking for cover songs; we're looking for songs written by recognizable songwriters, artists known as performers in their own right, but which were originally recorded by others - but more common than you might imagine, given the tendency of many artists to start their careers as songwriters and small-scale performers, famous within the music community before they record their first record, not to mention the wont of some famous artists to pen songs for other voices as a sort of side-project. Not all thematic entries will have as rich a history of coverage as These Days, of course - some songs that fall into this theme are never recovered by the original artist; others are, but don't end up standing on their own as well in the hands of others. But it can be a delightful surprise to uncover authorship in these cases. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what the Star Maker community comes up with.