‘Percy’s Song’: Joan Baez’s greatest-ever cover song
A cover song is one of the hardest things an artist can do. It’s also the reason why so many musicians across history absolutely despise them.
Prince led the charge with this particular sentiment. He said that he could never understand why the same rules didn’t apply to music as they did in film: why anyone would want to create something that was already a perfect version of what it was. He was probably bitter about Sinéad O’Connor sprinkling gold dust all over one of his originals, but still, he had a point.
Don Henley was once so bitter about a cover song, he took it to court. Well, that wasn’t the sole reason, but it played a big part. When Okkervil River covered ‘The End of the Innocence’, he was seething. And then he mirrored Prince’s earlier grievance by saying, “You don’t go into a museum and paint a moustache on somebody else’s painting”.
Maybe it’s pride, or maybe it’s also a sense of unease at someone else telling your story. Joni Mitchell went into this once when she talked about how to pour emotion into a song. She said, “It’s, you know, the words to the song are your script. You have to bring the correct emotion to every word. You know, if you sing it pretty, a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty, it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that.”
This, among many other reasons, is probably why most people fail to cover Mitchell’s songs with the same sentimental flair as she performed them. But one person through history has defied all odds, one person no one can argue against when it comes to the beauty of covers: Joan Baez. In the early days, it was her bread and butter, performing a mix of folk songs, hymns and hits to cement her position as a force in music.
Soon enough, Baez became something of a museum, reflecting the nuances of music past and present. And her cover songs are each so unique that it’s difficult to pinpoint the best. From Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ to Bob Dylan’s ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, Baez truly has the power to bring new light to any song, sometimes with more of a raw emotional power that outshines the original.
While many would be blue in the face arguing that the best are obvious, it’s actually a lesser-known gem, a performance from DA Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back, that saunters to the top. In the film, Baez sings a laid-back, heartfelt rendition of Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’. Some might question this decision, calling attention to the countless other songs that are more stark choices. But what makes this one even better isn’t how beautiful it is; it’s how much history it holds in such a simple clip.
In the film, we see her singing the song with Dylan typing away in the same room. It’s a scene that steals the whole show, as do all of Baez’s appearances in Dont Look Back. But what makes this one stand out is how much the words seem completely her own, her voice not faltering for even a second as she casually outperforms the original writer present in the space as she does so. Her narration of the story of a person on trial for manslaughter comes across more as a lament, a rumination on the deeper, more melancholic parts of her own soul.
It’s no wonder, therefore, that her performance is what brought the song to public attention. A The Times They Are a-Changin’ castaway became an unintentional cultural moment simply because it was Baez singing it, and that’s the power she holds even today.
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