Yep - “Tainted Love.” And it’s a great soul record, not an insipid piece of white person pop trash played by people with one-finger keyboard skills.
Nesmith didn’t record the song until after Ronstadt did: the Stone Ponies version was released in 1967; Nesmith’s in 1972. I’m guessing he wrote it for the Monkees, but it wasn’t considered commercial enough. However, it appears the Greenbriar Boys’ version came before Ronstadt’s; they weren’t listed in the All-Music Guide as performing the song, so I missed it.
The idea of performers being required to write their own songs really didn’t begin until the late 50s. Elvis, for instance, had an entire career of songs by other people (I don’t think he wrote any of his own songs, though he does have songwriting credit on some of them – but it wasn’t unusual in those days for a big star to demand songwriting credit in return for recording the song). As rock came it, the idea that you only performed your own songs caught on, and once the Beatles hit it big, it was expected that performers wrote nearly all of the songs they performed. About the only people to become rock stars doing covers are Ronstadt and Joe Cocker, and, to a smaller degree Rod Stewart and Janis Joplin (though the latter two also wrote for themselves).
The pendulum seems to be swinging back. Britney Spears and Clay Aiken (and most other American Idol stars) show that people don’t care about who wrote the song (or, for that matter, who sung it).
You could get into a book-length tangent based on those first three words, especially if you included the story of Dino Valenti’s other most famous composition, “Hey Joe.”
“Good Morning Starshine” is, of course, also originally a song from “Hair.”
Joe Cocker also wrote a few of his own hits (with Chris Stainton): “Black-Eyed Blues,” “High Time We Went” and “Woman to Woman” are all Cocker/Stainton tunes.
And that’s why I fell in love with her when I was 13.
I’d totally forgotten that song. Thanks.
When you heard the song or when you saw the album cover?
Yes 
Not the same thing. To “cover” a song means to record a song that someone else has previously recorded, not just to sing something written by someone else. Since I don’t know anything about Clarkson’s music, I’ll use another American Idol alum as an example; Clay Aiken. Every song on his CD, “Measure of a Man”, was written by someone other than Clay Aiken, as he’s not a songwriter. However, not a single one was previously recorded by any other artist, so they are all “original” to Clay Aiken. If another artist records any of those songs, then they’d be considered “covers” of Clay Aiken’s songs.
Sorry, but Wendell Wagner’s cite is wrong. If you pay close attention you’ll see that they list Billy Joe Royal’s “20 Greatest Hits” album, which came out in 1988, as the “cover” one, ignoring the fact that it previously appeared on his “Down in the Boondocks” album, released in 1965, which is how it became one of his 20 greatest hits, and which preceeded Ronstadt’s recording by 17 years (her version on “Closer” came out in 1982).
There are several errors on that site, and I have emailed the administrator the corrections.
Doing covers was the norm back in the early sixties.
But there is film of him performing the song (or an early version of it) which was used as a short clip on the “Monkees” television program. I don’t know the date of the original airing of the episode, but I imagine it may have beat the Stone Ponies recording’s release by a little bit.
As with nearly everything else worth talking about, The Master has addressed this, too. Notice the artists and titles mentioned in this snippet of his wisdom.