What's the Best (or Worst) Cover Version of a Song?

A busker in Helen, Georgia, singing "Angel From Montgomery"
as good as John Prine, almost as good as Bonnie Raitt.

What's the best (or worst) cover version you've heard of a favorite song?

I'm "asking for a friend" because -- somewhere in Bergenfield, NJ (I won't say precisely where or when to protect the innocent) -- I recently heard a performance of the worst cover version in the history of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind."

It was jangly and upbeat, and I rushed home just to play the original version to restore balance in the world. That's when I also stumbled up another cover of the same song by Johnny Cash. It was heart-breakingly good. Give it a listen...

 

Around the same time, Cash also recorded his famous cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt" -- which is here, if you're not one of the several hundred million people who have already streamed it.

Perhaps my all-time favorite great cover is Springsteen's version of "Jersey Girl," originally by Tom Waits. Here are 10 others I love:

• "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley (originally Leonard Cohen)
• "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell (Gloria Jones, and "our song," according to someone I once dated)
• "Angel from Montgomery" by Bonnie Raitt (John Prine)
• Just about any cover version of "Creep" (although Radiohead's original version is classic)
• "Mad World" by Gary Jules (Tears for Fears)
• "The Sound of Silence" by Disturbed (Paul Simon, a bold choice, considering how Paul's "American Tune" is perhaps my all-time favorite song)
• "Me and Bobbie McGee" by Janis Joplin (Kris Kristofferson)
• "Hasten Down the Wind" by Linda Ronstadt (Warren Zevon)
• "Sweet Jane" by the Cowboy Junkies (Lou Reed)
• "Songbird" by Eva Cassidy (but only as a homage to Christine McVie)

How did I exclude anything by Tori Amos? Well, anyway, those were the first that came to mind on this, Aretha Franklin's birthday.

Aretha, after all, out-covers anyone, even Bruce and Tori, with her version of Otis Redding's "Respect." Did you ever hear her version of Elton John's "Border Song"? She changes the end lyric from "What's his color? I don't care" to the more challenging "What's is color? Do you care?"

As for bad covers, I think I remember The Muppets once singing "We Built This City" about a dozen years ago. But maybe I was hallucinating, and I never much liked original by Jefferson Airplane/Starship anyway.

Perhaps -- having just watched the final episodes of "Daisy Jones & The Six" last night -- I'll say my least favorite cover is U2's version of the otherwise haunting "Dancing Barefoot."

Covering a Patti Smith classic? Some things just shouldn't be done.

What do you think?

Poem: 'Byzantium in Jersey'

My grandfather, 1969, Budd Lake, NJ

Last week's poetry prompt from Dimitri Reyes intrigued me greatly.

"Today is my grandfather's birthday," Dimitri wrote. "Though he is no longer on this plane, I still hear him in my mind and I honor him through voice & spirit... When doing research into my own Puerto Rican culture and discovering how I was going to traverse 'creation myth,' my grandfather's successes and failures helped fill in the spaces -- fully and honestly."

I listened to Dimitri's poem, "Papi Pichón" ("Father Pigeon"), and the poet invited me to "create my own bird."

So this week I couldn't get my own grandfather out of my mind. He died in 1976, and just in the past three months, I've mourned the death of three other close and extended family members.

I also thought of a favorite poem, one I used to recite to my daughters as a lullaby, about the passage of time. This morning -- thinking of Yeats' bird of hammered gold and gold enamelling, and imitating (poorly) the iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of "Sailing to Byzantium" -- I wrote the following (although, PS, I'm still debating that next-to-last line... considering "This, my father's father's mysterium"):

Byzantium in Jersey

 

This, my grandfather, in his Sunday best:

a cigarette dangling from its holder,

a tattered suit, a worn Italian vest,

with me at his side, decades less older.

He does not hold my hand. There is no rest.

He lectures as we walk, points my shoulders

toward a butterfly he displays to me

along the shores of Budd Lake, New Jersey.

 

This, a back country road, is my classroom:

milkweed, honeysuckle, red columbine,

hummingbirds, spotted touch-me-nots in bloom,

blue robbins’ eggs, goldenrod, dandelions.

My grandfather names them for me, assumes

I will remember that sparrow, that vine,

the chicony, those edible lilies,

the songs of mimicking catbirds we see.

 

These have all vanished for me.

 

I live in the suburbs, reminisce now

about ancestors. One Sunday, I walk

the Hackensack riverbank in a drought.

During the golden hour, a gyring hawk

directs my gaze to a sun-kissed bough

where a crow blinks back in silence, stalking.

This, I know, is my father’s father’s song

of what is past, or passing, or to come.

"Varry and Kate," my grandparents.
Photo by my father.

 

Poem: 'Grief's Cliche'

I have only one prompted poem to offer today for February, and it was written in March.

Another that I wrote was too personal (naming names). I submitted still another for publication (with the assurance it was otherwise unpublished), and the last of the weekly prompts I received from my poetry Patreon was a reading, rather than writing, assignment.

The prompt for the poem below was simply, "How is your body a mausoleum of flowers?"

"Mausoleum of Flowers" is the title of this poem by Daniel B. Summerhill, and the image had special meaning to me as I contemplated the funeral and burial of my uncle on March 2.

For the past week, I couldn't get this short poem out of my head. I kept thinking of the roses pictured here, the ones gathered in front of the altar of Sacred Heart Church in Clifton and later placed upon the grave at Calvary Cemetery in Paterson. This was my first draft:

Missing You

I pricked my finger on the rose
I cast atop your grave.

My droplet of blood,
camouflaged by the buds
the others threw on you.

Then you were hidden too;
your body, a mausoleum of flowers.

While each of us beheld
the shorn beauty of your life
and pretended we would live forever.

---------

And this is where I landed (revised, 3/24/23):

Grief's Cliche

The rose I cast upon your coffin
is scent-less in the dead winter’s cold.

Thorns, rendered painless;
my fingertips, numb.

Curiously, I see a timid trickle of my blood
mix with the petals already covering you.

Then, lost in red, you are hidden too:
Your body, a mausoleum of flowers.

I exhale. A puff of air dissipates like incense.

My life shorn, my body suspends itself.

Lungs empty, I kill time at your grave.

I crave belief, yet question all truths:

This pretense I am sharing
a final breathless moment with you.