The 10 most covered songs in history
In the musical world, covers are commonplace but often sneered at. “Couldn’t come up with anything yourself them?” you might hear pundits deride. However, covers are and have long been an essential part of music’s evolution; lest we forget that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones leant on a crutch of blues covers in their formative years before finding confidence and time to fill their own discographic diaries.
Covers are often used to raise awareness for smaller acts and promote taste exploration. For instance, in the early 2000s, Johnny Cash brought his distinctive acoustic gravity to Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ and Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’. These songs were given a very different lease of life we otherwise wouldn’t have conceived. Meanwhile, it was intriguing to explore the scope of Cash’s taste in contemporary music.
Today, we’re taking a look through the top ten most covered songs of all time. Unsurprisingly, The Beatles won both modally and with the top-ranking track, ‘Yesterday’. The immensely popular ballad from 1965 was released as a single in the US and soared to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
‘Yesterday’ is now comfortably one of the band’s – and hence the world’s – most popular songs, but it almost didn’t materialise at all. McCartney allegedly composed the entire melody and song structure of the mournful ballad in a dream one night while sleeping at the Wimpole Street home of his then-girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he rushed to the piano to play the song and hum some early lyrics to keep the memory ablaze.
Convinced that he must’ve subconsciously plagiarised someone else’s work by the phenomenon known as “cryptomnesia”, McCartney was hesitant to record the song. “For about a month, I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before,” McCartney recalled in his biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. “Eventually, it became like handing something in to the police – I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks, then I could have it.”
He continued: “So first of all, I checked this melody out, and people said to me, ‘No, it’s lovely, and I’m sure it’s all yours.’ It took me a little while to allow myself to claim it, but then like a prospector, I finally staked my claim, stuck a little sign on it and said, ‘Okay, it’s mine!’ It had no words. I used to call it ‘Scrambled Eggs’.”
McCartney’s initial lyrics to the first verse read: “Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/Not as much as I love scrambled eggs”. Fortunately, these were swapped out for the equally syllabic yet infinitely superior words, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away/Now it looks as though they’re here to stay/Oh, I believe in yesterday”.
Today, there are more than 1,600 recorded covers of ‘Yesterday’, according to Guinness World Records. Meanwhile, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) reported that the song was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.
See the full top ten list below.
The 10 most covered songs in history:
- The Beatles – ‘Yesterday’
- The Rolling Stones – ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’
- Elvis Presley – ‘Love Me Tender’
- Michael Jackson – ‘Billie Jean”
- The Beatles – ‘Eleanor Rigby’
- Frank Sinatra – ‘My Way’
- Simon and Garfunkel – ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’
- Bill Withers – ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’
- Leonard Cohen – ‘Hallelujah’
- The Beatles – ‘And I Love Her’