One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.
Forgive me for getting a little personal, but when I first heard Club Nouveau’s cover “Lean on Me,” my reaction was simple: “What? Why?” I loved the Bill Withers original, mostly because it was released the year I was born. During my early mixtape years, I created one with the biggest songs from 1972. (Along with every year of my life up to that point.) As a side note, several other songs from that 1972 tape spawned covers within a few years, including “Without You,” “Oh Girl,” “I’ll Take You There,” “I Can See Clearly Now.”
Bill Withers wrote and recorded “Lean on Me” for his second album, Still Bill. He intentionally kept the lyrics simple. The song connected immediately, reaching #1 on both the Billboard Soul chart and the Hot 100. After its April 21, 1972 release, it earned Gold certification — more than a million copies sold — in less than two months. By year’s end, Billboard ranked it as the seventh-biggest song of 1972. Rolling Stone later included it among “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and the song is part of the Grammy Hall of Fame.
So now you understand my initial reaction to a cover of this classic: “What? Why?”
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Dervish have form, having delivered 37 years as one of the premier traditional folk baton holders from the Emerald Isle. Back in 2019, they released “The Great Irish Songbook, Volume I,” culling a bevy of faithful standards from the vaults of the tradition, songs predominantly by trad.arr. This time around they celebrate the current crop, this century and last, of Irish troubadours and songbirds, enlisting, once more, an all-star cast of compadres to expand and embellish the legacy. Last time it was the likes of Steve Earle, David Gray and Rhiannon Giddens. For “The Great Irish Songbook, Volume II” it is the Indigo Girls, Del McCoury, Sarah Jarosz, the recently deceased Moya Brennan and a whole lot more. Songwriters chosen include Van Morrison, Shane MacGowan and Sinèad O’Connor.