<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process.\u201d In her latest memoir M Train<\/em>, Patti Smith speaks of W.G. Sebald\u2019s After Nature <\/em>with bibliophilic hunger. She is seeking inspiration and therefore turns to a favorite work. Smith continues:<\/p>\n

\u201cI read and feel the same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I read her book with a similar hunger, I realize that I\u2019ve felt this way before, in the precise way she has described it \u2013 when I listen to the music I love. \u201cThe desire to possess\u201d what has been written, played, and sung. This desire is so strong that it ventures upon wish fulfillment; I often feel as though I am taking communion with the music\u2026eating it, so to speak. For a split second, I near convince myself that I <\/em>have written it. That it is mine.<\/p>\n

I often wonder if this is a personal quirk (a hallucination) or if others experience the same phenomenon. I wonder if it is perhaps the subconscious impetus to cover songs, even. What if instead of mere flattery, or tribute, possession also informed Jeff Buckley\u2019s version of \u201cHallelujah\u201d or Jimi Hendrix\u2019s take on \u201cAll Along the Watchtower?\u201d They certainly made both songs their own. I do not mean a jealous possession, necessarily, but an attempt to be \u201cone with\u201d the song, at the risk of sounding faux-metaphysical.<\/p>\n

Cover songs as a genre get a bad rep, it seems. Covers = karaoke, or worse, Covers =\u00a0Cover Bands. <\/em>It was after all a throng of home-recorded cover songs that launched Justin Bieber<\/a>\u2019s career. But cover songs lead a double life. In their pop\/rock identity, it is often considered a lowbrow, unoriginal form \u2013 sometimes even an attempt at latching onto the search engine optimization<\/a> of the artists being covered. But in a cover song\u2019s blues\/folk\/country life it goes by another name: a traditional. Throughout countless genres that could be filed under the umbrella of \u201cfolk\u201d or \u201croots\u201d music, artists recorded their own versions of songs passed down by performers before them.<\/p>\n

Much like the poems and fables of oral history, it was common for the original authors of traditional songs to remain unknown. Take for instance the trad number \u201cGoodnight, Irene,\u201d which was first recorded <\/em>by Lead Belly in 1933, and by many others thereafter. But the original songwriter has been obscured from music history. There are allusions<\/a> to the song dating back to 1892, but no specifics on who penned the version Lead Belly recorded.<\/p>\n

Lead Belly claimed to have learned the song from his uncles in 1908, who presumably heard it elsewhere. \u201cGoodnight, Irene\u201d was subsequently covered by The Weavers (1950), Frank Sinatra (1950, one month after The Weavers\u2019 version), Ernest Tubb & Red Foley (1950 again), Jimmy Reed (1962) and Tom Waits (2006) to name but a few.<\/p>\n