There must be some kind of way out of here

[venta]

Well, today NME has published a chart of the "best cover versions of all time".

It's here: http://www.nme.com/news/muse/53090

Virtually none of them meet my criteria for a good cover. In particular, I don't believe that most people will have had any idea that the songs were covers when they first heard them. If someone had to tell you the song you know is a cover, it doesn't count.


[Poll #1622076]

Other reasons why the NME is wrong: in their corresponding chart of the worst cover versions ever, Madonna's American Pie only makes #8.

Edit The Beatles' song should of course be Twist and Shout. Search and replace error :)

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

There's versions of the riddle elements going back to about the seventeenth/eighteenth century at least. It's possible that the refrain was added or borrowed from another song, though.

(If I was at home I could dig out my English Book of Penguin Folksongs, Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes and Child's Ballad Book to answer this more fully.)

Update: OK, home now with time on my hands!
Leache's Ballad Book suggests two sources: a 17thC broadside called 'The Elphin Knight', which has the chorus 'Blaw wind blaw/ the wind hath blaw my plaid awa' which contains many of the same riddles, though differently phrased (e.g. "It's you maun mak a sark for me /without any cut or seam, quoth he"). The second was collected in America in the 19thC and has the more familiar riddle lyrics (e.g. "Can you wash it in yonder well / where water ne'er ran or rain ever fell") and a nonsense chorus ("teaslum teaslum templum / fluma luma lokey sloomy") which MAY be Gaelic in origin.

Now, it's pretty obvious from the metre that the 17C version (let's call it A) can't be sung to anything like the tune of Scarborough Fair. However, the 19thC version (B) definitely can. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the song we now know as Scarborough Fair was written as a broadside ballad in 17thC, drawing on a rich tradition of English riddle lyrics dating back to at least 9thC, and that it was given a then-fashionable Scottish/Jacobite flavour with the business about plaids. It was then picked up in Scotland and/or Ireland and conflated with an existing tune and Gaelic chorus, and went to America to become version B - and may have survived in the UK also - with the chorus degenerated to gibberish. Someone (possibly Carthy) collected it, added the framing narrative about visiting the true love in Scarborough, and 'made sense of' the now nonsense chorus.