Haven’t been in any church in years, but I generally heard Love Me Tender as coming from Aura Lee - a civil war tune IIRC.
Yeah - a slight variant on the question of why fiddle tunes have titles? So you can tell 'em apart!
The example I was going to offer was Red Wing/Union Maid.
Eh…that’s quite a stretch. I hear more “Roll Out the Barrel” or something like that in there.
Compare the intros:
For me, it’s really pushing it. I can hear it, but it’s faint.
There’s a tiny bit that sounds similar to “Flintstones , meet the Flintstones” but that’s it
I hear them as being fairly similar as well.
The lyrics to “I Look Up When I Walk” were vague enough they could be about anything.
Let’s look up as we walk, so that the tears don’t spill
Remembering that spring day, that lonely night.
Let’s look up as we walk, count the blurry stars
Remembering that summer day, that lonely night.
When A Taste of Honey did it’s cover, to writer Janice-Marie Johnson,
it seemed the song’s original lyrics had 3 possible interpretations: as the mindset of a man facing execution; as someone trying to be optimistic despite life’s trials; or as the story of an ended love affair. Johnson decided: “me being the hopeless romantic that I am, I decided to write about a love gone bad.”[
I’d never heard that before. Very interesting.
I would stop short of calling it a re-write. For me, the most recognizable feature of SIBLY is the four-bar chord progression (D7 Dbmaj7) at the end of each chorus, and “Death Valley Blues” does not have this. So LZ did add something of considerable value. Both songs owe a lot to the ambiance of “The Thrill is Gone”.
What I find most striking is how much Page’s solo sounds like the solo in DVB. It’s not note-for-note, but several brief passages are. Despite this, I consider Page’s solo on SIBLY possibly the greatest rock guitar solo ever. Everybody stands on the shoulders of others.
But Led Zeppelin were no boy scouts when it came to outright theft. They didn’t just steal from decades-old material (which lots of rock and folk musicians did did) they stole from contemporaries (e.g., Dazed and Confused).
“Wabash Cannonball” repurposed as a tribute to the father of railroading in northern Norway:
You Give Love a Bad Name by Bon Jovi comes from a Bonnie Tyler song If You Were a Woman (And I was a Man)
Three examples:
Aretha Franklin rewrote the Otis Redding song “Respect” from a plea of an obviously cuckolded husband to be treated fair to a hymn demanding respect for (black) women’s rights.
Bob Dylan in a way never finished one of his greatest songs, “Tangled Up In Blue”. He used to exchange pronouns and rewrite the stanzas for years after the release on “Blood On The Tracks”, and there are several different versions which were officially released. Here’s the original compared to the 1984 live version from “Real Live”:
And in good old folk tradition, the Stone Roses used the tune of “Scarborough Fair” for their little ditty “Elizabeth My Dear”
Guns N Roses - Don’t Cry
Guns N Roses - Don’t Cry (alt lyrics)
Same song, different verses.
Latto’s “Big Energy”, which took the music from Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” and put completely different lyrics to it.
Yeah. There’s a place in each where it hops up an octave, then descends except skipping the 7th, so 8, 6, 5, 4. You can’t copyright an interval or the basics of a descending scale. The previous phrases don’t descend by the same intervals (Paloma Blanca goes down a third; Flintstones goes down a fifth). Rhythms don’t match at all.
Beatles “Revolution”
Single version, recorded a few weeks after the White Album version, but released first as B side of “Hey Jude”:
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
White Album version, recorded before, but released after, the single:
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out (in)
I don’t remember (or much care) what John’s waffling was about. Probably couldn’t decide which bandwagon to jump onto.
And of course, there’s Nena’s “99 Luftballons” in German, and later English and hybrid versions.
“God Gave Rock & Roll To You” is not originally by KISS, or even Petra. It was originally written and recorded by Argent; when the Christian band Petra wanted to record it, they wanted to change several of the words, which Argent allowed, but the KISS version is a direct remake.
The two consecutive versions of “The Twist” also have slightly different lyrics.
Do listen to those! Changing it from first person to third person and changing the storyline was brilliant! Studio/Live
Studio Version:
She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam, I guess
But I used a little too much force
Live Version:
She was married when they first met
To a man four times her age
He left her penniless in a state of regret
It was time to bust out of the cage
And my favorite throwaway stanza, just because of the way Bob surprised us with the last line (he had a smile at that point, he knew we’d be going “Huh?”)…
Studio Version:
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I’s lucky for to be employed
Working for a while on a fishing boat
Right outside of Delacroix…
Live Version:
And he drifted down to New Orleans
Where they treated him like a boy
He nearly went mad in Baton Rouge,
He nearly drowned in Delacroix
I heard Dylan live, and so many of his songs were changed around. I remember one lounge-style bass-and-saxophone tune that was just beautiful, and it wasn’t until a long (tasty) instrumental and two verses had gone by that we looked at each other and said “Tom Thumb’s Blues?!?” Oh, and we got yet another version of Tangled Up In Blue.
And here’s the official music video, courtesy of Classic Arts Showcase.
Both of them would’ve come from this Civil War song…
Jim Weatherly wrote a song called Midnight Plane to Houston. Weatherly was a friend of actor Lee Majors. One night he called Majors’ house and his then-wife Farrah Fawcett the phone. She said Majors wasn’t home, and she couldn’t talk, either, because she was taking a plane to Houston to visit her mother. Weatherly wrote the song about the conversation. Later, when Gladys Knight asked to record the song, Weatherly rewrote the lyrics into Midnight Train to Georgia, which became a huge hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips.
