“Strangers” is a Kinks song written and sung by Dave Davies. It’s on their 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One.
It was covered in a recent YouTube commercial that I saw in the Super Bowl pre-game show. It was also in the soundtrack for the film The Darjeeling Limited.
Bob Dylan recorded “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. The original released version is not on YouTube but one of the outtakes is. There are also versions from his Rolling Thunder Revue. Joan Baez is one of artists who has covered it.
“Six Days on the Road” was originally recorded by Paul Davis in 1961. It was made famous by Dave Dudley in 1963.
A recent Amazon Prime commercial uses the Chuck Berry song “it Wasn’t Me”. It’s from his 1965 album Fresh Berry’s and was released as a single in October 1965. This is a great choice of a relatively obscure song by an outstanding artist.
I had no idea that the Jefferson Airplane had covered “Tobacco Road” until I saw this Instagram post. It’s a 1960 John D. Loudermilk song that was made popular by the English band Nashville Teens in 1964. I really doubt they had ever been to North Carolina when they covered it.
“Honky Tonk Blues” was a big hit for Hank Williams in 1952. I like the solo Richard Thompson version.
“Do Re Mi” was written by Woody Guthrie and released in 1940. As noted in the Wikipedia article, the phenomena of people moving to California from the Dust Bowl during the Depression was also addressed in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (which I highly recommend as well as the John Ford film from it).
I had no idea this was a cover. The famous version of “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle is from 1974 but it wasn’t the first. The original version by the Eleventh Hour was also released in 1974. Even though the Eleventh Hour included one of the song’s authors, their version is not nearly as good as the much louder and faster one by Labelle. A new version by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Pink was on the Moulin Rouge soundtrack in 2001
I have been watching Dont Look Back about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. There’s a scene where Dylan and Joan Baez performs the Hank Williams song “Lost Highway” in a hotel room. I always assumed Williams wrote it but it is a cover of a song by Leon Payne. I was shocked since most famous Williams songs were written by him.
It has the line “I’m a rolling stone”. I wonder if that was in Dylan’s thoughts when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone”.
“My Way” by Frank Sinatra was played as the Trumps left Washington yesterday. It’s a French song with English lyrics by Paul Anka.
Sad! 