Just listened to a snippet of music accompanying a Youtube clip and thought “plaisir d’amour” and realized most people would have thought of the Elvis song sooner. This got me thinking of other well-known examples of full or partial tune re-use.
[ul]
[li]Plaisir d’Amour and Can’t Help Falling In Love[/li][li]Aura Lee (Civil War-era song) and Love Me Tender[/li][li]ABC song/Twinkle Twinkle Little Star/Baa Baa Black Sheep (were these all bsed on something else)[/li][li]He’s So Fine and My Sweet Lord (arguably this was subconscious / unintentional). [/li][li]A Lover’s Concerto (“How gentle is the rain”) and Minuet in G[/li][li]The Kookaburra Song and a flute riff from Land Down Under[/li][li]A riff from Under Pressure, used in Ice Ice Baby[/li][/ul]
The country tunes “The Great Speckled Bird,” “I Am Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” “The Wild Side of Life,” and “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” all have the same melody.
Also, “Washbash Cannonball” and Woody Guthrie’s “Grand Coulee Dam” (Woody does this a lot). Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” is a close cousin.
“He’s So Fine” The Chiffons/“My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
“Be A Clown” Cole Porter for the musical “The Pirate”/“Make 'Em Laugh” Arthur Freed for “Singin’ In The Rain”
And from the recycling your own tunes department:
“School Days”/“No Particular Place To Go” Chuck Berry
“I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)”/“It’s The Same Old Song” The Four Tops (both written by Holland-Dozier-Holland)
From the “No Repeat Radio Station” thread, there were guesstimates of anywhere from 10 to 58 NEW albums per week being released (actually, there were guesses of even more, all over the map). With that in mind, and realizing that of the, er, Googolpex or so ways notes can be combined to form a finite length song, a minute fraction is actually listenable, I think lots o’ similarities can be found especially if you go to down to sections of songs.
That said, since we’re including 19th century music, how about “Eyes of Texas” v. “I’ve been working on the railroad”
BTW, how would you categorize Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” - does it get a double song match score?
There must be hundreds of instances in which two or more folk songs have the same tune (or one tune has multiple sets of lyrics, whichever way you want to look at it). As a few examples, Bob Dylan took various folk tunes and wrote new lyrics to them:
“The Leaving of Liverpool” --> “Farewell” (not the same as “Restless Farewell”)
“Scarborough Fair” --> “Girl from the North Country”
“Lily of the West” --> “As I Went Out One Morning”
“Lady Franklin’s Lament” --> “Bob Dylan’s Dream”
The same thing happens with blues songs. For example:
“Come On in My Kitchen” = “Sittin’ On Top of the World”
Santana took an obscure single by the Five Emperor’s (sic) called “Karate”, wrote new lyrics to it, and called it “Everybody’s Everything.” Did pretty well with it.