Quote:
Originally Posted by Pitar
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.
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I have to say, a lot of this confused me. "Covering" has been around as long as music has. To restrict it to the last hundred years or so: Son House, Robert Johnson, those guys didn't write a lot of the songs they recorded, and I take them both very seriously as musicians and artists. Mississippi John Hurt didn't write "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" or "Spike Driver Blues" or a whole bunch of other songs he recorded beautifully. Short list of artists who have covered Huddie Ledbetter: Pete Seeger, the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Nirvana, Bob Dylan. Speaking of Bob Dylan, he didn't write 'House of the Rising Sun,' and neither did Nina Simone, and neither did the Animals. All great recordings, though. The Beatles were one of the greatest cover bands of all time, and built their performing chops playing covers almost exclusively. Half of Led Zeppelin's first few albums were covers of (or stolen from...) Willie Dixon songs. The list goes on and on and on, and few (if any) of those are "faithful" renditions of the original. Covers aren't new. (The concept of note-for-note 'tribute' bands might be, though.)
And getting back to the artists in the OP's post: Side 1 of James Taylor's Sweet Baby James closes with a cover. On John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" album: he wrote (or co-wrote) the title track, but three of the six songs on side 1 are covers.
A lot of things changed between 1974 and 2004, sure, but you can't blame cover bands on America's Youth. That's an olllllllllld tradition, and a good one at that.