This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Seanette: Cut "Neil Diamond has had this problem a second time. When UB40 covered Red Red Wine, they didn't know it was by him, only being familiar with a cover by Tony Tribe." as duplicating a more detailed listing further down.
Ronfar: Does this ever happen to movies? When a remake of a film becomes better known than the original, to the point that people forget it was a remake?
- EVERYTHING Elvis Presley did was a cover. So far as I know, he didn't write a single song himself.
- He wrote nothing, but a number of his recordings were the first made.
- EVERYTHING Elvis Presley did was a cover. So far as I know, he didn't write a single song himself.
This trope isn't about who wrote it, it's about who performed it first.
Later:
- This troper had heard of Badfinger's version, and knows it was released first, but thought that Nilsson was the fella who actually wrote the song. If that's true, this example might be a subversion.
Nope, if The Other Wiki is to be believed, t'was written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans.
Yet later:
- This troper both heard the original first and greatly prefers it.
Conversation In The Main Page.
Still later than that:
- Wasn't "There She Goes" first performed by The Velvet Underground?
- That's a different song of the same name.
- That is "There She Goes Again," and the two songs sound nothing alike.
- Wasn't "There She Goes" first performed by The Velvet Underground?
Perhaps we should have a trope that really specifically says "Don't reply with a correction, edit the original or pull it out".
CA Lieber: Iadded the bit about a generational aspect because I heard Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" before I heard Claptons, and, being 30, I heard Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" before The Ataris were even formed. I have never heard Tina Turner's "Proud Mary."
CodeMan38: Wow, I had no idea that "Can't Get Enough Of You Baby" was released by The Four Seasons before Question Mark and the Mysterians covered it. Not often one encounters a double Covered Up.
CodeMan38: I also had no idea about Otis Redding's original of "Hard to Handle". This wouldn't be so bad were I not from the same state as both the original performer and the cover group... :-p
- Too bad she couldn't enjoy it, since she died in 1977 (in the same car accident that killed T. Rex's Marc Bolan).
- She was driving the car, but wasn't killed. She's still alive today.
- Too bad she couldn't enjoy it, since she died in 1977 (in the same car accident that killed T. Rex's Marc Bolan).
Well then. ``
- In this troper’s considered opinion, Bob Dylan excels as a songwriter only, and when people say “Nobody plays Dylan like Dylan,” they are being ironic. As a result, he is doomed to hit this trope every time a stand-out performer covers one of his songs.
- This troper strongly disagrees.
- In this troper’s considered opinion, Bob Dylan excels as a songwriter only, and when people say “Nobody plays Dylan like Dylan,” they are being ironic. As a result, he is doomed to hit this trope every time a stand-out performer covers one of his songs.
The purest example of Conversation In The Main Page that I've seen in quite a while.
Later:
- In terms of memetic music, the new mixes are almost always going to stay with people better than the original. case in point: okkusenmen
taking over Wily's Castle I from Megaman 2, and the McRoll version of U.N. Owen was Her.
Not at all this trope.
On Istanbul (Not Constantinople):
- The song screams 1950s. Most people assume it's a cover.
- Conversation In The Main Page.
- No they don't. I've never seen anyone who wasn't surprised to be told it, and with TMBG's varied musical stylings, it's not like they couldn't have composed it.
Prfnoff: Narrowed the description substantially to exclude the following examples:
- Most people attribute Terry Jacks or Nirvana with "Seasons In The Sun", when it was originally by Jacques Brel. To be fair, the original was titled "Le Moribond" and was in French, so Terry Jacks could have claim over the English version.
- Except to rightpondians, who will assume it was Westlife.
- Jacques Brel gets another one as well - so many other people have done covers of "Jackie" (at least twenty) that nobody seems to know who did it first, with the result that the first famous version - Scott Walker's - is assumed to be the original, and there's at least one instance of a cover turning up on a Scott Walker tribute album.
- Not exactly a cover, but have you heard of a French song called "Comme D'habitude"? Paul Anka got the rights to the music, wrote all new English lyrics, and Frank Sinatra sang it as "My Way".
- In the same way, Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" is actually an English cover of Charles Trenet's "La mer", and Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him" is a cover of a French song called "Chariot" sung by native Englishwoman Petula Clark.
- Same with Darin's 'Mack the Knife', an English cover of a German song 'Die Moritat von Mackie Messer', which came from Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera.
- Ironically enough, Claude François, the same person who wrote the original "Comme D'Habitude", also wrote French lyrics for cover versions of an awful lot of non-French songs. Check out the list on The Other Wiki.
- Film example: The Departed, which won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, was a remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.
- What about "The Fast Show" that used to be on the BBC? I was unaware that the "All Around my...." song was an actual song. Only, in the original, the word after "my" is "hat", not arse.
