It seems that back in the 60s and 70s, songs were written and then recorded by various people in the hopes that one of the recordings would be a hit. In a lot of cases, most people never heard the unpopular version and never knew that someone had recorded the song before. But a few people might have had the single of the first version and then hear the popular version and immediately recognize it as a cover.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote hundreds of songs and they were performed by many different artists. A lot of Dionne Warwick’s songs were written by Bacharach and David. The Beatles even recorded a version of “Baby It’s You.” Do a Google search and there are a number of sites that talk about that. But you’re not likely to EVER hear anything actually recorded by the pair. They did release some albums of their songs, but the one that I heard was recorded by an orchestra. They were not performers.
Andy Williams recorded 49 albums between 1956 and 2000. Every song on every album was a cover. He recorded songs by Paul Williams, Hank Williams and Mason Williams, not to mention a hundred other songwriters with names other than Williams, but only 14 were credited to Andy Williams (that I can find). He made a career out of recording other peoples songs. He had a popular version of MacArthur Park in 1972 which was previously recorded (and popular) by Richard Harris and also The Fifth Dimension.
Williams recorded “Get Together with Andy Williams” in 1969 with covers of “Get Together” by the Youngbloods, “Aquarius” which was from the musical “Hair” and then recorded by The Fifth Dimension, “Good Morning Starshine” by Oliver, and “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond plus a bunch more. I have a recording my Mother made off the radio around 1970 and in the course of an hour, they played two tracks off that album.
If you look at this link you’ll see that in his discography, the album titles are all the names of songs that other people popularized.
Tom Jones also did a lot of covers, including some recent cover albums of rock music. Allmusic has a pretty long “Performed songs by:” list.
If you look at all the songs Elvis Presley ever recorded or performed, only 8 of them were actually written by Elvis and none of those were big hits. If you look on Allmusic and check out the songs that Elvis popularized (especially later in his life), many of them had notable previous recordings. It’s just that once Elvis sang them, everybody forgot about the older versions.
I could go on and on, but anyone can go to AllMusic.com and research some of the big names from the 70s and 80s and see how many of them didn’t write their own music and how many of the big songs had previous recordings.
(Anyone know what song Gloria Jones recorded in 1964?)