Cover Me Q&A: What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question comes from staff member Tom McDonald:

What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

Ray Padgett

The White Stripes’ Greatest Hits album a few years back missed a big one. True, it wasn’t a song that Jack wrote. No, they didn’t ever record it on an album. But if you ever saw the Stripes in concert—and especially if you saw them a lot, as I did—it became one of their signature songs. Hell, they played it a lot more often than “Fell In Love with a Girl,” an actual hit, in later years. Their shows usually ended the same way. “Seven Nation Army” was the penultimate song. Newcomers surely assumed that was it. But no. Almost every night, “Seven Nation Army” was just the warmup act for the true finale: “Boll Weevil.”

“Boll Weevil” is an old blues song often credited to Lead Belly, where Jack and Meg likely first heard it, but with murky origins stretching back even further. As they did with their famous “Jolene” cover, the Stripes garage-rock it up, bashing away with abandon and the distortion set to 11. It became a big crowd-singalong moment, something they were way too cool to encourage on their own songs. Plus they added a verse:

If anybody asks you people
Who sang you this song
You tell ’em it was Jackie White!
He’s done been here and gone

Then the big crowd sing-along on the “He’s looking for a home” refrain, first quiet then loud as hell. Jack often said the same thing at the end, breathlessly rushed out before he left the stage: “MysisterthanksyouandIthankyougoodnight.” It was the last song they ever performed in concert.

Mike Tobyn

An acute ability for arseholery (asshattery for our Transatlantic friends) means that any discussions of the musical genius of John Martyn will always be tempered by non-musical interludes. This is only fair but is, of course, a shame. Martyn came up through the ‘60s folk revival in the UK, and although he generally preferred his own musical compositions, accompanied by sometimes exquisite lyrics, he did also nod to the traditional tunes he heard in his youth and on the folk circuit. It is not that surprising that the tale of a wayward prodigal son returning to his home appealed to him, and he played it throughout his career.

This version from 1996, thirty years after he started on the song, is so poignant. In a band with long-time collaborator (and frequent co-conspirator) Danny Thompson on bass, he has Scottish fiddle maestro Aly Bain supervising and playing, and all star folk musicians from the UK and US on board. It is literally Bain’s show, as the session is taken from a TV program he was creating for the BBC, and you can sense the trepidation that he has with two noted hellraisers in the ensemble. Martyn literally sweats to concentrate and keep himself on track and on good behavior and, as a result, the band produces a haunting, haunted reading. Martyn’s weathered, once-smooth voice and always new-sounding guitar shining through the dissolution.

It is possible to read the lyrics that Spencer’s years of aimless wandering come to an end with his return to home. Martyn himself believed that the protagonist only ended his journey when he was hanged for his many crimes. He sang it until close to the end.

Riley Haas

The first known recording of “The House of the Rising Sun” sounds a lot like what you might think an “Appalachian” or “old-timey” song would sound like: Claren Ashley has a brittle voice and his guitar sounds so high it could be a banjo or something like that instead. Harmonica player Gwen Foster wails in the background, but he was so far from the mic you could easily ignore his part for most of the performance. It sounds like a song that has existed forever and it sounds an awful long way from rock and roll.

Between 1928 and 1964, lots of different people covered the song. The Animals apparently learned it from a singer named Johnny Handle, but there’s a good argument that they relied at least in part on Bob Dylan’s arrangement of it from his debut album. It seems like Dylan had appropriated that arrangement from another American folk singer, Dave Van Ronk. Some people also cite Nina Simone’s first version (which is much closer to the folk versions of the song than her later, upbeat performances).

Regardless of who they took inspiration from, The Animals’ decision to play the song as a rock arrangement utterly transformed the song. From the opening arpeggio and Eric Burdon’s raspy, how-is-he-British? blues voice, to Alan Price’s performance on the Vox Continental organ that comes to dominate the track, to the frantic strumming of Hilton Valentine, it sounds like a brand-new song. This cover launched their career, but also is the version that every cover of this song will be compared to. Some people even claim it invented folk rock. (It sounds nothing like The Byrds, so…) It’s one of the great examples of a band taking a song and completely making it their own so that most people don’t know there’s an original. They’ve owned this song for 60 years and, personally, I can’t think of too many other traditional songs where that’s happened.

Adam Mason

At the start of 1996, the musical tide in the UK had most certainly turned toward Kinks- and Beatles-inspired indie bands in thrall to Mike Leigh films, mods, and lager, lager, lager. But that’s not to say there wasn’t room for Nick Cave and PJ Harvey’s rendition of a Scottish murder ballad dating back to the eighteenth century and involving a jealous woman stabbing her lover to death and throwing his body into a well. In fact, the mournful track was a welcome contrast to the Britpop high jinks. The pasty-faced couple were truly majestic in their reinterpretation of the traditional folk song once called “Young Hunting” and now called “Henry Lee.” And their performance of it was gloriously empowered by the sexual chemistry between them that was more than evident in the accompanying video. An unlikely Top 40 hit, then, but an unforgettable one, which helped rescue the murder ballad from the beardy folk-rock tradition of Fairport Convention and demonstrated that it was far from, err, dead.

Seuras Og

One of the hardest pieces of homework yet sent my way, as I am an entirely unreconstructed folkie, specializing in the Celtic fringes thereof. The choice is immense, with innumerable traditional songs etched in my memory, and, possibly, DNA. But in the end, it became simple, with this exquisite rendition capturing so many nerves, raising a goosebump at every note.

“The Parting Glass” has an inexorably haunting melody, the reason behind there being quite so many versions, let alone all the songs that have plundered the melody to convey a different lyric, which seems a daft waste of the consummate wordage already there.

All the money that e’er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm ever I done,
Alas! it was to none but me.

Widely assumed to be Irish, it actually came first from Scotland, with a lineage stretching back to the mid-1650s. Since then it has been covered, stolen and bowdlerized by many. However, one of the purer recent versions was by Sinead O’Connor, mentioned as integral to this version. boygenius, the celebrated vocal trio of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, took it upon themselves to commit their version to posterity last year, on learning of O’Connor’s untimely demise. Hooking up with Ye Vagabonds, an Irish duo of brothers Diarmuid and Brian Mac Gloinn, and who are responsible for the sensitive musical backing, this was released in tribute to O’Connor, with all proceeds donated to the Aisling Project, O’Connor’s favored charity.

It is almost impossible to describe the perfection gifted to this version, the vocals gallingly poignant, both as each of the women sing in turn and then together. It probably isn’t too late to buy a proper version, don’t just rely on the YouTube clip here.

Luke Poling

What makes a song “traditional”? Is it traditional because it’s really old? Is it traditional because we don’t know who wrote it? Or is it traditional because while generations come and go, we return to a particular song to find strength, or comfort, or some form of kinship?

“Hard Times, Come Again No More,” has woven its way through the fabric of the American story. Serving first as a comfort for families who lost loved ones during the Civil War, it has been called upon again and again for this exact same need. Versions have been performed during ceremonies remembering those lost on 9/11. Bruce Springsteen played it in 2009, as the nation struggled to recover from the financial crash of the year before.

Unlike most traditional songs, here’s a case where we know the author. Stephen Foster was only 37 when he died, but in his short career he wrote “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and other songs that are still familiar today. (Let’s set aside the fact that while some of Foster’s songs are indeed beautiful, some are also incredibly and painfully racist.)

This version of “Hard Times” was released on a 2004 tribute album, Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster. In this version, as is with much of Mavis Staples’ music, the first connection you make is with that voice. From her family’s work alongside Martin Luther King Jr., in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, to the painful loss we all suffer when a family member passes away, we can hear the miles in Staples’ voice. She has been there. She knows pain.

Staples’ version is presented sparsely, opening with just a piano and the deep, comforting growl of her voice beside us. She grieves with us, but she also knows that this too shall pass. As two acoustic guitars join in, the tone in her voice changes, slowly moving from sadness to resiliency. By the time she reaches the final repetition of the song’s title, we know that, with Staples beside us, we too shall rise again.

Jordan Becker

My in-laws lived in West Africa in the late 1950s-early 1960s, because my father-in-law, an architect, worked for a firm doing business there. My wife and her brother were born in Liberia, and her family later moved to Nigeria, before relocating to New Haven, CT. Among their friends in Nigeria were a couple who turned out to be the parents of singer/songwriter Jennifer Kimball, and we have pictures of my wife and Jennifer playing together as young children.

Jennifer became known as a member of The Story, with her college friend Jonatha Brooke, and our family saw her perform a few times as a solo artist, when she was a full-time musician. We were excited to find out that she was part of a group of diverse and talented musicians who were brought together by Matt Glaser, a violinist who taught at the Berklee School, to release an album in 2001 as The Wayfaring Strangers. Glaser, who specializes in jazz, Kimball, with folk music roots, bluegrass banjo player Tony Trischka, klezmer/jazz clarinetist Andy Statman, and others were the core performers, augmented by guests including Ralph Stanley, Tim O’Brien, Lucy Kaplansky, Tracy Bohnam and Cathie Ryan, and they created a collection of music that is fusion in the very best sense of the word. It was released both in the wake of the surprising popularity of the bluegrass soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and less than a month after the September 11 attacks, and its soothing sounds were comforting in difficult times.

“Wayfaring Stranger,” which dates back to at least the early 19th century, is song about wandering and hardship, and it’s been covered by artists including Burl Ives, Paul Robeson, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Natalie Merchant. But not surprisingly, The Wayfaring Strangers’ version is unique. Sung by Lucy Kaplansky, with Kimball providing harmonies, the mix of sounds and styles emphasized the universality of the song’s theme, although the klezmer clarinet, and Middle Eastern feel to some sections, may be an allusion to the “Wandering Jew,” doomed to wander for eternity for his sins.

Hope Silverman

Respect the ghost. That was the rule Sinead O’ Connor stuck to while recording her seriously gorgeous 2002 album of traditional Irish songs Sean-Nós Nua. In an interview with Pat Kenny on Irish TV that same year, she elaborated on why it was important not to adorn the songs with too many modern day sonic flourishes:

What I love about these songs are (that) they all have very powerful ghosts in them, they have these spirits who were real people who have something to say from centuries ago to us now. But because they’re spirits you have to be very subtle about what you put around them…There’s only a certain amount of stuff you can do to them before you lose the ghost.

“Peggy Gordon,” which actually has its roots in Nova Scotia, is a staggering ballad of unrequited love. Full of longing, confusion, the desire to escape feeling anything about anyone ever, the song has been covered by multitudes, including The Dubliners, The Chieftains, and The Corrs. But for me, Sinead’s version blows them all out of the freakin’ water. Ten years ago or so, I made a playlist of Sinead ballads that I would sometimes listen to before I went to sleep (corny but true), and “Peggy Gordon” was the centerpiece of that sentimental, homemade thing.

Sinead’s “Peggy” is majestic. It is heartbreaking. It is full of the most beautiful ghosts… may they live forever.

Curtis Zimmermann

Ritchie Valens was one of the most efficient rockers of the ‘50s. His professional career spanned just a few months before his untimely death in early 1959 alongside Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. In that time, the teenager recorded several of the most enduring songs in the history of rock n’ roll, which perfectly captured the youthful energy of the era. These include the rowdy three-chord powerhouse “Come On, Let’s Go,” and the teary young-love ballad “Donna.” At the same time, he also practically invented the genre of Chicano rock with his cover of the Mexican folk tune “La Bamba.” By fusing traditional Mexican music with rock sounds, he inspired many artists, including the great Carlos Santana and Los Lobos.

As great as Valens’ “La Bamba” is, I’ve always felt that Los Lobos’ 1987 cover is even better. Recorded for the Valens biopic of the same name, Los Lobos’ high-octane cover is a musical tour-de-force. With its souped-up guitar licks and solos, rapid-fire percussion and multi-instrumental mix, they turned the Valens cover into a mini-rock n’ roll symphony while still retaining the edge of an early rock tune. The cover was Los Lobos’ biggest hit. Along with the film, their version of the song helped immortalize Valens in music history.

Keeping the song true to its folk roots, the band ends the track with an acoustic outro using traditional Mexican instruments. In the film, young Ritchie sees the band perform it in this style in a brothel and is inspired to record the cover. Whether the story is true or not, it highlights how important the Mexican folk tradition was to the future of American rock n’ roll.

Tom McDonald

Karen Dalton is mostly known for remaining unknown. Although she was Bob Dylan’s favorite performer in the Greenwich Village folk revival scene, and her voice drew comparisons to Billie Holiday, she abandoned her recording career in 1971 after only two albums. With a 2005 re-issue of her final album, In My Own Time, Dalton’s music began to get proper respect. I think audiences were ready to hear her traditional material, like “Katie Cruel,” because the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? had been released a few years earlier, and its old weird Americana soundtrack became a bestseller.

“Katie Cruel” dates from the 1700s or earlier, and may have originally been about a sex worker. In Dalton’s version, all we know is that Katie Cruel is shunned by the people who once welcomed her, and she is kept apart from her own “heart’s desire.” No reasons are given. The chorus presents a conundrum, with lines that chase their own tail: “If I was where I would be then I’d be where I am not. Here I am where I must be, where I would be, I cannot.” Dalton’s hypnotic banjo stirs up the intensity, while an electric violin adds psychedelic menace throughout. Her voice always had a wounded quality, but on “Katie Cruel” it’s as if Dalton’s personal struggles (she had many) are caught up in the song itself.

Dalton’s take on the song inspired Nick Cave, the Fleet Foxes, and many other artists to attempt their own versions. None can match Dalton’s haunting authenticity.

Patrick Robbins

When I was a kid, my dad had pipe dreams of leading a family of child singers doing old classic folk songs. We had an album by Bob Hastings called 45 Songs Children Love to Sing that was played over and over to teach us the songs. But my dad gave it up, in part because of how much we laughed at the melodramatic death rattle of “Jesse James.” We kids just weren’t cut out to do more than cut up.

Years later, I discovered the Pogues had covered “Jesse James” on Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. Was I ever in for a treat! From the opening tin whistle, it’s clear that this is no mournful lament – it’s the celebration of an outlaw’s life as much as his death. It’s big and roaring, bold and brash, marrying the auld sod and the old West, and Shane MacGowan’s rough slurred vocals just add to the barroom atmosphere. (The pistol shots and ricochets don’t hurt, either.) In the Pogues’ hands, “Jesse James” feels the way a traditional folk song should feel – like you can’t possibly resist singing along at the top of your lungs.

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