Under the Covers №8
Jumping Jack Flash
In this series, we use a simple premise.
First, we look at a cover of a well-known song.
Second, we lift the duvet and look at the original that lays under the covers.
So, how do we define an original, and therefore a cover?
“La Mer”, or “Beyond the Sea”, was an interesting one, as you can read about here.
It brought up the question of what we’re going to consider the original version of a song.
The Old Anorak’s driving concern is to celebrate the music we write about and to ultimately provide the musically 20th-century curious an easy entry point into it, pure and simple.
So, an original version, as far as we’re concerned belongs to the earliest person we can find who recorded it commercially.
It doesn’t have to have been a hit, so long as it had an official release, and the public had the chance to buy it, even if in their droves, none of them did.
Meaning that a cover version is any version recorded by anyone, after this original recording, even if it’s by the song’s writer.
