[Pitar]

Originally Posted by Reasley

I am sitting here listening to acoustic covers on YouTube after concluding yet another semester and just listened to noledog's (Eric) cover of John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High."

I LOVE IT.

Eric is very talented at guitar and his intro to this song is just great and I like the tempo of his cover of the song and the way he generally does it.

So, I looked over at the woman that I'm dating and said "This is a FANTASTIC cover" and she gave me a dirty look and said "No."

Note that she is a HUGE John Denver fan and, when she hears a John Denver cover, she wants "carbon copy" -- or as close as one can get.

And, I "get it."

I am a huge James Taylor fan (Hey, I am a male baby boomer guitarist so that goes without saying, right?) and I cringe when I hear someone STRUMMING straight chords to JT's songs. Nails on blackboard.

So, I ask those who have been gigging for quite some time: how do you balance the carbon copy/self-interpretation dichotomy or do you just do what you want to do and figure that the audience is never going to like your music 100% song-by-song but the more important thing is to "do well" in total?

Noledog's version of John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High:"

https://youtu.be/d5DUI8eFjp0

There's copying and then there's covering. When I was coming up there was no such thing as covering. If you didn't copy the song (replicate it) then you simply did not play it and expect to be taken as a serious student of the guitar and the artists. The point of the whole thing was to give the songs their due and creative license was not an acceptable dodge, or excuse. You did your best to replicate the songs you set out to learn.

Your girlfriend's response to an original artist's cover by someone is the response you're going to get from an ardent fan dissatisfied with the cover's treatment of the song. It is what it is. I play JD's songs as he plays and sings them. Again, I was raised in a time when replication was the rule of the day.

Covering, watering down copying, relaxed the obsession of paying tribute to an original artist's works in the same audible renderings he or she gave them to us. I cringed when I came back to music in 2004 after a 30 year hiatus. The notion of covering was a ground swell supporting anyone who could cobble together the three chords necessary to poorly cover a song and, tethered at the hip of that whole new movement, political correctness cleared the path against champions of copying.

Somewhere in that time frame finger picking was re-coined as the high brow finger style; picking being possibly below the permissible verbiage of the haute of strings. Moreover, those championing the re-coining actually believe it was to re-frame a new concept of using fingers to pick (pluck) the strings. Right. Bluegrass to country to folk to rock to classical to blues to any manner of displacing strings with the fingers, it's all finger picking that does not need to be re-framed as anything more or less, or different. But, there it is: finger style.

I do my best to copy original works and I do it for me, not an audience. Some will counter that with the argument that it does nothing to display artistry of the player. I disagree. If you can copy an original work then artistry is what you've achieved. It's at that point when your skills set can pretty much render anything you wish to render. And, most people who can copy an original work have a pretty good repertoire of their own original artistry to give back. Rendering an original in variance to the way the artist gave it to us, and expecting it to be warmly embraced, is a leap of faith. It will receive lip service from some as a matter of recognition for trying, which I can see if comradeship is considered more important that the music itself, but then there's the ardent fan's ear expecting better efforts to respect the original artist's rendering.