A couple by Cowboy Junkies:
“Where Are You Tonight?”:
“Cowboy Junkies Lament”
Which is too evocative of Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts” to be coincidental.
And “Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)” which is self evident by title alone.
I’m sitting here watching Neil Young sing Long May You Run for the Vancouver Olympics closing ceremony. He sings, “Maybe the Beach Boys have got you now, with those waves singin’ Caroline, No”.
In the Joni Mitchell song Help Me the line, “You dance with the lady with the hole in her stocking” is a reference to the folk song Buffalo Gals.
John Fogerty’s Centerfield references Chuck Berry:
“Just a’roundin’ third and headed for home, it’s a brown-eyed handsome man”
The tip of the hat to Chuck Berry makes perfect sense in this song, because Chuck Berry was inspired to write “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” by Willie Mays. Who played… center field (for John Fogerty’s hometown team, the San Francisco Giants).
Yer Blues refers to “Dylan’s Mr. Jones” from Ballad of a Thin Man
Jimmy Buffett’s Door Number Three refers to Like a Rolling Stone with a reference to Miss Lonely having to “make a deal.”
Ironically, Alan White (who was Yes’s drummer for most of their history) played in the Plastic Ono Band, and was also the drummer on “Instant Karma”…but was not yet Yes’s drummer for “I’ve Seen All Good People” (it was Bill Bruford).
In the Electric Light Orchestra’s “Shangri-La” (the last track on “A New World Record”), there’s the line:
My Shangri-La has gone away / faded like the Beatles on “Hey Jude”
“Tweeter and the Monkey Man”, by the Traveling Wilburys, is an homage to Bruce Springsteen, and its lyrics contain the following Springsteen song titles:
Crud, missed that MacSpon had already listed this one. Sorry!
If you’re going to mention Tone Loc, might as well mention Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance”:
I sang on Doowutchyalike, and if you missed it
I’m the one who said “Just grab 'em in the biscuits”
And, as I’m somewhat embarrassed to remember, Humpty Hump did indeed deliver that immortal line on “Doowutchyalike.”
“Shooting Star” by Bad company starts:
“Johnny was a schoolboy when he heard his first Beatles song.
Love Me, Do, I think it was, and from there it didn’t take him long.”
“New Cut Road” (I forget who wrote it–I kknow I have Johnny Cash and Emmy Lou Harris versions) references itself (the character in the song plays a song called ‘new cut road’)
On Megadeth’s ‘youthanasia’ album ( I think) was a song where nearly all the lyrics were previous Megadeth song titles, but I can’t remember the name of that song.
Hootie and the Blowfish quote a whole chunk of Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” in their song, “I Only Wanna Be With You,” and later mention “Tangled Up in Blue.”
Some sources say Dylan sued them over that, others say he didn’t.
Alan Jackson’s “Midnight in Montgomery” references a lot of Hank Williams songs. Just about any country song references other songs or singers though.
Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said” starts with
*Jackie Wilson said,
it was “Reet Petite”
*
The guys in Aerosmith have always been huge Yardbirds fans (they’ve done several Yardbirds cover songs on record and in concert), and in “Living on the Edge,” they paid direct homage to an old Yardbirds song:
“If you can tell a wise man by the color of his skin,
Mister, you’re a better man than I.”
This line is almost a direct quote from the Yardbirds’ B-side “You’re a Better Man Than I.”
Elvis Costello, “This Is Hell”:
“My Favorite Things” keep playing again and again
But it’s by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane