covers

Last night I stayed up to hear Elvis Costello and Roseann Cash sing "The Butcher Boy" on Letterman last night. It's from the newly released Harry Smith Project, covers of the songs on The Anthology of American Folk Music. I've been thinking about covers a little lately because I'm currently obssesed by The Geraldine Fibbers' covers of "Jolene" and "Fancy."

The Costello/Cash perfomance was worth staying up for (ok, I was also reading) but their rendition of the song was a little anemic. Buell Kazee's is better, not because it's older, but because he seems to believe it where Costello and Cash just sing it. I know they're both performances, but the latter one is filtered through a (justified) reverence for Smith's work. I got The Anthology about five years ago and listened to it with a combination of recognition and surprise. I'd heard some of these songs performed by people in the 60s and later, but hadn't heard this source material before. Source implies originals, but really The Anthology is also a bunch of covers. Lots of the songs aren't original with the performers either. They're folk songs and ballads and blues that people were singing long before vinyl came along. For example, "Henry Lee" is a version of "Young Hunting" a Childe ballad, which means it could be as much as four hundred years old. But covers or not, there's something compelling about the music on original Smith collection that wasn't in the performance last night.

The covers I've been liking a lot lately, The Geraldine Fibbers ones I listed above and The White Stripes "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" work partly because they don't try to be faithful copies of the original. Jack White is completely overwrought in a way that the Dusty Springfield version suggests, but doesn't let out. The Fibbers' version of "Jolene", sung by a guy interestingly enough, is also not a xerox of the great Dolly Parton version. The one I'm really loving though is "Fancy". I can sort of remember the Bobbie Gentry version, but the new one is much more bitter, as it should be. There's a little quote from "Sympathy for the Devil" that fits perfectly.

So I'm not excited about the "Harry Smith Project" though I have it on my Netflix queue. I'm betting that there's going to be a lot of reverence and not much bite. I'm sort of looking forward to hearing Nick Cave do "John the Revelator" though.