As anyone who has ever played in a band knows, performing cover songs can be a very tricky business. Most of the time, you want your performance of a cover song to stick close enough to the original that it remains recognizable to your audience– I mean, that’s why you chose to play it, presumably because it’s a great song that people want to hear– but you don’t want to play so close to the original that you appear to be copycatting. Departing from the original in small or large ways, although necessary, is really a sink-or-swim venture. If you sink, the audience will turn their noses up and huff and think that you “ruined” a classic. If you swim, they’ll be reminded again of why they love that song on the radio and think how great it is to hear live. But if you really nail it, you just might capture the Holy Grail of cover song performance, i.e., you just might achieve the Better Than The Original (henceforth, BTTO) designation.
The BTTO category is occupied by very few cover versions of great songs, in my opinion, and the contenders for inclusion in that category are passionately argued for and against by music lovers everywhere. I’ve heard really good, though ultimately unconvincing, cases made for the White Stripes’ “Jolene” (originally a Dolly Parton song), Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” (originally a Leonard Cohen song), Grace Potter & the Nocturnals’ “White Rabbit” (originally a Jefferson Airplane song), Bon Iver’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (orginally a Bonnie Raitt song), Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the World” (originally a David Bowie song) and, of course, the two covers widely considered to be noncontroversial inclusions in the BTTO category: Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” (originally Dolly Parton) and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” (orginally Bob Dylan).
I had a hard time making my pick for today. It basically came down to two contenders. The one I didn’t choose was Three Dog Night’s version of “Try A Little Tenderness”, mostly because it would take me too long to make the case for any Otis Redding cover being BTTO. (I still think Three Dog Night managed to pull it off, though!) Instead, I’m going with Johnny Cash‘s cover of Three Inch Nails’ song “Hurt.” You can listen to the original here, and below is JC’s version:
“Hurt” was one of Johnny Cash’s last recordings before he died, and you can hear the wear and tear of many years of hard living on this track. He’s an old and lonely man, his body and his voice are failing him, but there’s an undeniably rich fount of wisdom in his weakness. Perhaps that has something to do with my affection for this song, but no more than the absolutely brilliants orchestration and performance by The Man in Black. One of the markers of a great cover is when the performer can make the song sound as if he or she wrote it originally. In Cash’s many covers of gospel tunes, I’ve always thought he was a genius at doing that, making them sound like the words were his. His version of “Hurt” sounds exactly like that, too.
I recognize that it’s more than a little ironic that my pick for my favorite cover song today is a song by Johnny Cash, probably one of the most frequently covered musicians in the history of country and rock n’ roll. But that seems entirely in keeping with the spirit of Johnny Cash and the relationship he had to “roots” music, the music of folk, of poor people and suffering people and people looking for some beauty in this world. All our songs are variations on pain and triumph, love and heartache, sin and glory. We humans are just the mouthpieces for those stories.
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Here’s your quick-access link to the entire 30 Day Song Challenge 2014 prompt-list and my picks for each day.