One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.
For our “What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song” post from last November, I wanted to write about The Third Mind’s version of “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” It seemed like the perfect chance to collect my thoughts about The Third Mind, a “supergroup” led by fiery guitarist Dave Alvin (formerly of The Blasters, The Knitters, and X). After all, The Third Mind featured the spell-binding singer Jesse Sykes, who had fallen into a mysterious silent since 2011.
Except I found out that “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” is not a traditional song. Not even close. It was written in 1963, and recorded by The Jaynetts that same year.
OK, so I was wrong. In my defense, Joan Baez misled me. In the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, we see Baez in a hotel room singing “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” Baez mostly played traditional ballads (when not playing Dylan covers), so I assumed this song too was “trad.” I also knew that the British folk band Pentangle–those revivers of traditional British Isles roots music–had covered the song on an early album.
But you know what they say about people who assume.
So who were The Jaynetts? A Harlem-based girl group of sorts, a trio formed in order to record the song. And the entire point of the song was to cash in on the “girl group” wave so popular at the time. As many as ten, perhaps more, female singers laid down vocals for the single, most of the women going uncredited. The unwieldy number of vocal tracks created a haunting, atmospheric recording—sonically unusual for the time—and “Sally” became a hit, reaching #2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
People with an ear pressed to their transistor radio back in 1963 still talk about the intense speculation around the song’s true meaning. Or at least they still leave comments on YouTube. Some heard allusions to a same-sex relationship, or to an abortion, or to infidelity, or to heroin use. The songwriters, Zelma Sanders and Lona Stevens, never shed light on the matter; they only stated that their starting point was the age-old nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie.” Nor did Sanders and Stevens write another song together, nor are either of their names attached to any other widely popular songs.
Few artists beyond Baez and Pentangle considered “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” to be cover worthy. The exceptions are interesting, and they include the pioneering all-female rock band Fanny, the film director Jim Jarmusch (while still in The Del-Byzanteens in the early 1980s), and Donna Gaines (soon to take the stage name Donna Summer). But special attention goes to The Great Society featuring Grace Slick, whose strange take on “Sally” clearly inspired The Third Mind version.
The Great Society recorded their cover in 1966 during a live show at the Matrix. The club was a catalyst for the acid rock scene emerging in the Bay Area. The band certainly experimented with “Sally,” first by taking it into a minor key, then tossing away half its verses, and eliminating The Jaynetts’ call/response format. Grace Slick (who was soon to join Matrix house band Jefferson Airplane), brought a menacing air to her vocals. And finally, the group laced “Sally” with extended instrumental jams (very trippy, very space rock in an early Pink Floyd kinda way). By these means The Great Society left the innocence of the Jaynetts back in another era.
The Third Mind not only embraces all those revisions to the original but intensifies them. Jesse Sykes establishes a spooky mood with her dark velvet voice. Dave Alvin brings his decades of guitar-artistry to the jam-out sections, and deploys electronic effects that The Great Society didn’t have access to back in the day. A flowing collaborative chemistry lets the band twist and turn as a unit during their instrumental explorations; I guess that this emergent collective intelligence is what the Third Mind means (the phrase was coined by the writer William Burroughs). As Alvin tells it on the band’s website, neo-psychedelic freedom was the whole point of starting The Third Mind side-project. He cites ’60s-era Miles Davis as the project’s main guiding spirit. “Basically, Miles would gather great musicians in a studio, pick a key and a groove and then record everything live over several days. Then he and [Ted] Macero would edit and shape these improvisations into compositions. Having never recorded like that, I had a fantasy to try it someday if the fates ever allowed.”
Their “Sally” jam tells a riveting story, and a fairly long one–the Great Society doubled the length of the Jaynetts hit, but The Third Mind tripled it. The band’s second guitarist David Immerglück (Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven) most likely gets some of the credit here–I’d love to know if Alvin yielded the solo to Immerglück once or twice, and if so where the baton-passes occurred. Veteran drummer/percussionist Michael Jerome (of too many projects and bands to begin to list) plays with time and texture in engaging ways, and, when the moment is right, creates a beautiful turbulence.
An even longer live version of “Sally” appears on the band’s recently-released album, Live Mind. I won’t say this new live version derails or fails to soar, but I much prefer the peculiar magic of the version on The Third Mind 2 from 2023. But best to keep an Open Mind about it.
Tim Buckley also covered it on Sefronia