** Memory ** from CATS has been covered by everyone. There’s over 700 recordings of it. It also must get some type of award for being covered in the most languages (English, German, Japanese, Dutch, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Norwegian, Hebrew and Russian that I am aware of. There may be others).
I had heard a number of years ago that Yesterday was the song with the most number of recorded covers. don’t ask’s cite backs up this claim.
While it seems to me that Silent Night could easily have 3000 or more covers, I’ll have to stick with Yesterday until I see other evidence.
Like, can you get behind it!?
While this is probably not the most covered song, I’ve got to say that Little Wing has been covered a bunch (I can think of Sting, Derek and the Dominos, and Stevie Ray Vaughn off the top of my head), and all those covers have been excellent.
no cite, but a whole lotta folks have done Johnny B. Goode.
Yeah, if I was trying to drum up interest in an auction I’d probably say things like this too. They also have this statement a few paragraphs up:
This has already been refuted by Cecil in a column I quoted in one of my earlier posts but here a debate of the term “performed” comes up. I don’t know that I would trust Yahoo as a reliable source of music trivia. They don’t even list their source for the first quote.
Techincally, any performance of a song not originally yours can be called a “cover” (can you cover your own song?). Once published on a recording media for public consumption I guess you can call it a released cover. I realize that Opal seems to be looking for “radio type songs” but the OP and this clarification are really too general. I doubt that any single entity can keep track of a song worldwide, paricularly in those countries where US copyright is ignored. I’m not entirely convinced that “Yesterday” is still the most covered song though I’d say it’s a strong contender. Can someone point out a site that lists all the artists and the year it was covered?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “Stardust.”