What, exactly, is a cover song? And where did the term come from?
“It’s not like [playing a character],” Joni Mitchell once said, explaining the secret to singing with emotional vulnerability. “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…it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that.”
When we think about the modern description of a cover song, therein lies the truth of it. It’s not about simply re-recording something that exists, but bringing something new to the table, even while keeping it loyal to all the facets that made it good in the first place. And while there are always arguments against the cover as being a lower art form—to borrow a famous opinion from Prince—it’s always been a necessity, one way or another.
But the etymology of the word itself and the culture from which it emerged as a popularised musical trope seems to breed some kind of contention for various reasons. On the one hand, when you look back to the golden age of covers, the 1960s, the cover song was a legitimate strategy artists adhered to to somehow try to outdo the successes of the originals, like getting their own name heard, which was all about that pesky, unrelenting churn.
Mitchell also likened this to the “law of averages” in 1967. Around this time, covering others’ songs was part of the wheel, the distinction that extracted people’s names from the strange haze of the songwriter versus performer limbo, while also making them seem intelligently well plugged in. It’s the main reason why, when looking at the plethora of hits from that decade, many were covers of songs released in the year or two prior, whereas now, covering a song is a far more flexible practice that doesn’t hinge on the prospect of staying relevant (at least, not in the same way).
But mainly, it was about artists getting there first, even if technically, they didn’t. But it also blurred the lines between what a cover is supposed to be and whatever it is we regard it as now, like whether we see it as a reimagined version of something that was already great, a copy of something that needed a revamp, or a spin on something that nobody knew could be caught in a different light. But that confusion also stretches to the word itself, and where the term ‘cover’ actually came from, both in a literal sense and when considering the cultural contexts of the market at the time it became more well-known.
Where did the term “cover song” originate?
Another heady point of contention is where the word ‘cover’ came from when looking at the concept itself. While there’s an obvious association with it meaning to place something over or in front of something else that already exists, that meaning actually started somewhere else, somewhere with more ambiguous, opportunistic connotations that reflect the cultural disparities of 1940s, 1950s and 1960s communities.
Complexities of race during these decades meant that labels, organisations and publications segregated audiences within spaces, crafted specifically for them, like Billboard and other titles, which split out their musical lists and features by genre and audience demographic. Obviously, this meant that certain songs by Black artists would be intentionally omitted from other spaces, meaning that white artists dominated mainstream pop spaces.
This also means that crossover only really occurred when white artists would cover hits previously released by Black artists, supporting the claim that ‘covering’ a song, at this time, was a catch-all term for white artists effectively repurposing Black sounds for their own hits and commercial success. Don McLean put it in such a way when he once reflected, “If a Black act had a hot record, the white kids would find out and want to hear it on ‘their’ radio station”.
He continued, “This would prompt the record company to bring a white act into the recording studio and cut an exact, but white, version of the song to give to the white radio stations to play, and thus keep the Black act where it belonged, on Black radio. A ‘cover’ version of a song is a racist tool.”
DJ Luxxury also echoed this during an episode of One Song Podcast, saying, “The origin of the term ‘cover version’ is you’re covering a part of the market not covered by the original. If this audience is hearing it, this audience isn’t. This goes back to the racist origins of cover versions, but to oversimplify it, the rock ‘n’ roll record gets it to the white people.”
However, while it’s important to lend credence to those cultural contexts, the cover version, specifically how we see it now, didn’t always necessarily hinge on those disparities or practices. It eventually morphed into a more common term for the simple act of recording a new version of an existing song, disassociated from the market-driven implications of its potential origin.
