On his very first album, Dylan does House of the Rising Sun in the appropriate gender - as opposed to the later Manfred Mann version, which makes it the ruin of many a poor boy, which is absurd,
Kate Bush’s cover of Rocket Man kept the original gender:
She packed my bags last night, pre-flight…
I don’t know if it meets the strict definition of a cover since it has some added material, but the first thing that jumped into my mind was Gloria by Patti Smith. It was probably the most glorious rendition of a 60s pop song I ever heard.
Marlene Dietrich’s cover of Lili Marlene, for one. (I’d kinda be surprised if that was the only one she did)
Any version of Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier performed by a male singer, that I’ve heard.
Cher’s You Better Sit Down Kids:
You better sit down kids.
I’ve got something to say.
Your mother is staying
But I’m going away.
I’ve always wanted to do Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song & Dance, which is about a British woman coming to New York and sleeping with a bunch of guys, with a gender flip, making it about a gay British guy yada, yada, yada.
That wouldn’t ping me as not changing the gender…but there is the whole “I’m a rocket man” and “I’m not the man they think I am at home”
Gillian Welch wrote her song Red Dirt Halo from the male perspective, and I think there’s some others of hers as well.
The Cowboy Junkies cover Neil Young’s Powderfinger without changing the gender - “He told me red means run, son, and numbers add up to nothing”.
Many folk singers don’t change the gender when covering a song - June Tabor recorded a stunning version of And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, and I don’t think that song would make sense with a gender change. I’ve regularly heard both male and female folk singers sing traditional songs from the other gender as well.
Some guys who have covered Memory from Cats do sing “I was beautiful then,” but others change the line to “It was beautiful then” or “Life was beautiful then.”
Frank Mills is a song from Hair based on a flier the show’s writers saw from a girl trying to find a boy she’d shared a day with. It’s sung by a teenaged girl in the show (possibly Diane Keaton in the OBC- she was in the cast but I’m not sure if she did a solo). The Lemonheads did a cover of it- it’s freakier when 30-something guys are looking for a long haired guy they love but are embarassed to be seen with.
On Glee they often have a male character sing a song originally performed by a woman, or vice versa, although these are often songs where there are no clearly gendered lines to be changed. But there are exceptions, like this (not very good) mash-up of “Stop, In the Name of Love” and “Free Your Mind” in which a male singer denies that wearing high-heeled shoes makes him a prostitute. There was also an all-male cover of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills” that is directed at a “trifling, good for nothing type of brother.”
There have been a few cases where Glee kept the original pronouns even when they didn’t match the character the song was being sung to in the episode. For instance, this did a cover of Robin Thicke’s “When I Get You Alone” sung by a guy to another guy even though the song uses the words “girl” and “she”.
That doesn’t strike me as gendered at all. A woman can of course receive oral sex, and the subject of the song is referred to as “you” throughout and could thus be a man or a woman. The most gendered line from that song that I can remember is “You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception.” That still works if the singer is a woman, although it takes on a rather different meaning.
I usually think of “giving head” as specifically fellatio (and “eating out” as specifically cunnilingus). Don’t think I have a dictionary quite edgy enough to see if I’m correct or not though.
Allow me to introduce you to Urban Dictionary, which supports Lamia’s theory.
Well, the pronoun is the major rhyme pair in the song. Crimson and Delphinium just isn’t quite as catchy
I just checked and believe it or not, this is actually covered by the OED under “head”:
slang (orig. U.S.). Oral sex; fellatio or cunnilingus. Freq. in to give (good) head : to perform fellatio or cunnilingus (well).
“There She Goes,” by the La’s, covered by Sixpence None The Richer.
The most irritating was on the wedding episode when Kurt sang Just the Way You Are to Kurt and kept such lines as “Girl you’re amazing”. I thought it odd they kept that intact considering how much Kurt is bullied (even Sue called him “Lady”) and that Finn then leads Kurt in a dance (i.e. Kurt takes the woman’s position). The character’s not transgendered but an openly gay male and I thought it was a tad insensitive. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being transgendered or a woman, but if you’re not you’re not and I don’t think they’d have said “Girl you’re amazing” if they were singing to Mr. Schue or Puck.)
Linda Ronstadt singing “December Dream.” with the Stone Poneys.
I can see her slowly walking through the empty streets of morning…
I bought three incarnations of that album (Stony End), vinyl, 8 track (ha) and mp3.
The only justification I can see for this is that maybe we were meant to understand that Finn was singing the song for both his mother and for Kurt. It didn’t really seem that way, but in his speech Finn did say that his mom and Kurt had both helped him to be a better man so that could have been what they were going for. It did seem weird, though.
To be fair, Finn is taller. Kurt is by far the better dancer, which probably trumps height, but he had taught Finn to lead so they had danced that way before. It bothered me more that Kurt wasn’t leading when he danced with Blaine in the prom episode, but that’s another story.
I think that, whichever way they go (change pronouns or not), if you know the original this is nearly always jarring, unless teh pronouns are left alone and it is fairly clearly intended to have been changed from a straight song to a gay one, as with Joan Jett (or vice-versa, I suppose, though I can’t think of any examples). Otherwise, either they are saying something weird (apparently gay lyrics sung by someone with a straight image), or the changed lyrics sound too stilted and careful (and, sometimes, you lose rhymes and even may subtly upset the rhythm).
An exception that occurs to me is Janis Joplin’s version of Me and Bobby McGee, which I think does get away with changing “she” to “he”. But perhaps this is because I think it is by far the best version of the song, anyway. Indeed, the original is a bit gender confused already (unintentionally, so far as I can judge), what with being about a a woman called Bobby. (Yes, I know women can be called Bobby, but by default it is a male name, and, because it does not actually have many gendered pronouns in it anyway, you actually have to listen quite carefully to the original to realize it is about a girlfriend rather than about a male buddy.) It actually makes more sense as sung by a woman about a man.
Linda seemed to make a specialty of this. In Different Drum (written by Mike Nesmith IIRC - the actually talented one in The Monkees) she gets to sing “Oh I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty…”.
The song, and her performance, are good enough to survive it, but it does provide a moment of “Huh!” (I am reasonably confident that Linda is straight, although she is very pro gay rights, apparently.)