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The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. ~John Bush (allmusic.com) |
| The Billie Holiday Story – BBC Documentary (56min) |
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Continue reading April 07: The late Billie Holiday was born in 1915 – 100 years ago
This is my third collection of good cover versions of Dylan songs sung by incredible women, many of the songs are suggestions from our readers. Thank you, for great tips and for pointing me to great music that I hadn’t heard before.
Here are the other two posts:
The first post: 12 Bob Dylan covers done by incredible women
The second post: 12 Bob Dylan covers done by incredible women
Let us start with Joni, and wish her a happy recovery.
It’s all over now Baby Blue – Joni Mitchell (audio):
Continue reading The 3rd post with 12 Bob Dylan covers done by incredible women
“By the time you get close to the answers, it’s nearly all over.”
– Merle Haggard
The first time we met is a favorite memory of mine.
They say time changes all it pertains to
But your memory is stronger than time.
I guess everything does change except what you choose to recall.
Wikipedia:
Merle Ronald Haggard (born April 6, 1937) is an American country music song writer, singer, guitarist, fiddler, and instrumentalist. Along with Buck Owens, Haggard and his band The Strangers helped create the Bakersfield sound, which is characterized by the unique twang of Fender Telecaster and the unique mix with the traditional country steel guitar sound, new vocal harmony styles in which the words are minimal, and a rough edge not heard on the more polished Nashville Sound recordings of the same era.
My Favorite Memory:
Continue reading April 06: Merle Haggard was born in 1937 Happy Birthday
We like cover versions here at JV, and here are some more good examples. They are not better than the originals, but they are different and they are good. …and before you kill me in the commentaries, listen to Miley Cyrus’ effort, it is surprisingly good!
We got mail, comments and facebook messages about who should have been included in PART 1, we just had to do a second post on this wonderful subject. It is great fun to dig into this matter once again.
To do a cover version is sign of appreciation, the artists show their love of other peoples creation. We try to find interpretations that add to the experience of the song, versions that are not too similar to the originals. We also trust our emminent taste when it comes to picking the renditions that we present here.
Enjoy!
…and here are many more cover versions of Bob Dylan’s songs
Joan Baez – Sad eyed lady of The Lowlands (audio):
Continue reading 12 more Bob Dylan covers done by some incredible women
“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about “Sam Stone” the soldier junky daddy and “Donald and Lydia,” where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be “Lake Marie.” I don’t remember what album that’s on.”
– Bob Dylan (Interview with Bill Flanagan 2009)
Lake Marie is from the album, Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, the 12th studio album by John Prine, released in 1995. The song was inspired in part by Prine’s crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. It is one of my favourite songs, not just by John Prine, but by any artist.
John Prine:
“It’s an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There’s an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About ’59, ’60, ’61, I grew up in Maywood – it’s a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren’t related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they’d find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it’s what the song needed right then.”
Lake Marie (album version):