what’s a song cover that you think is better than the original?


The first ones to come to mind are Whitney’s version of I Will Always Love You and Allen Stone’s Georgia On My Mind but I would love to hear other contributions as well! I feel like there are a lot of songs where a covered version gets more popular than the original and people end up not realizing that it is a cover (ex. i had a friend that genuinely believed the Jonas Brothers wrote Year 3000). so, what‘a a song that was written by one artist but (figuratively) owned by another?

kazana

@richopp 
"
This is TOTAL HERESY, and I apologize to one of my favorite vocalists, but Linda Ronstadt's ARRANGEMENT of Smokey Robinson's "Ooo, Baby, Baby" is really good."


Have you heard Seal's version from the Soul 2 album? 

@sokogear Guess you missed my earlier posts.  I was going to get after her Buddy Holly stuff, but I just can't say anything against any Buddy song.  To me, as a person who was coming up at the time, Buddy and Elvis and Jerry Lee and Chuck are the masters, period.  You can redo their stuff, but it will never be like it was originally.  It was hard enough for me to pick Linda's version of a Smokey song.  As I posted, it is kind of heretical to one of the all time greats...

@julie_priest I just listened to it and to me, it sounds like the Ronstadt ARRANGEMENT, which is clearly different from Smokey's, and it is good, no doubt.  I guess if you prefer a male version, that would be the one to go to.

Cheers!

There are lots of great covers here and I’ll try organon a proper answer later.

For now, and given the songs already mentioned, I am surprised not to see lots of support for Mr. Cash singing Personal Jesus. 
 

Mind you, as soon as I typed that, I realised that I need to mention:-

 

Bert Jansch’s cover of Davey Graham’s Angie (no, not the Rolling Stones song) and the Stones’ cover or Robert Johnson’s Love In Vain.