A term used in the popular music industry usually for a recording of a particular song by performers other than those responsible for the original recorded version; it may also be applied to a re-recording of a song by the original performers (generally using pseudonyms) for a rival record company. In the 1950s and 60s a cover typically entailed the re-recording of a song, for the purposes of disseminating it among a broader or different section of the record-buying public from that of the original. At this time many international popular music hits were in fact cover versions by established white performers of songs originally recorded by black artists on small regional labels.
By the late 1960s the term had largely lost these purely commercial connotations. Rock and soul artists recorded their own versions of songs which had often already been hits in their own right: thus John Lennon had a hit with Ben E. King’s Stand by me in 1975. A cover can simply be a straightforward copy of the original song, or a more radical reinterpretation of it: the Talking Heads’ rendition of Al Green’s Take me to the river actually appears to be an analysis of the song, and the arrangement of the Beatles’ Help, as performed by Tina Turner, changes the melody and harmony so fundamentally that it is scarcely the same song as that written by Lennon and McCartney.
While the term cover is not often applied to such reworkings, some of the principles of cover versions are present in the Remix. In the 1980s reggae artists used the term ‘version’ for dub remixes of their own songs, in which they altered the sound of the original by adding delay and other electronic effects. By the 1990s the concept of the remix had developed in dance music such that a single was often reinterpreted in a number of different styles: for example Dreadzone’s Life, Love and Unity (1996) contained a dub instrumental as well as techno and drum and bass remixes.
ROBERT WITMER/ANTHONY MARKS/R