Why was the 1960s the golden age of cover songs?
If you were going to try to make it as a musician in the 1960s, you had to embrace the churn. And that’s not just about being aware of how much the industry would swallow something up and spit it out again, it’s about knowing you’ll have to step up to whatever pace it demands of you, and be prepared to accept decisions that have already been made. That way, you might just benefit from the “law of averages”, as Joni Mitchell said in 1967.
The familiarity of cover songs will always be their best-selling point. Even today, a good cover is usually enough for us to attach ourselves to musicians we may not have embraced before, or go looking for the original version of the song we hadn’t known existed. We might even find ourselves falling more in love with artists or songs we were already aware of, the power of their version giving it a certain edge we didn’t know we needed at the time.
Suppose that’s also why, in the 1960s, the cover song was almost phase one of an artist’s journey, easing audiences into the newness of a face and sound they hadn’t come across before. An agency, team, or label would likely set up a meeting with artists they see potential in and tell them something like, “You know, if you put your spin on this Sam Cooke tune, you’ll give them a few minutes of enjoyment. But if you make it better somehow, they’ll know your name.”
But it’s also not really that simple. Yes, pushing new artists to cover standards or others’ singles was the usual path to take, and it’s one almost everybody did, from The Beatles to Joan Baez, but that alone doesn’t explain why the decade became such an explosive breeding ground for covers, even if it did give people a better chance of standing out in the beginning with songs that we already established favourites as opposed to originals.
We also can’t overlook the obvious context here, in that, in the ’60s, there was still a strange distinction between being a songwriter and being a performer. In the previous decade, mass fan culture had shaped itself around names like Elvis Presley, who, whether you like it or not, was never really seen as someone who was particularly lyrically inclined or poetic with words in the way that many ’60 songwriters were. He was an entertainer with charisma, but he wasn’t a creative leader in the way we know many musicians to be today.
Thus, the ’60s became this strange community of two clashing concepts, but in the middle lingered the rising talents who held a hefty bit of both: songwriting talent and allure, with enough of each to “make it”, but not quite as much to avoid putting in the hard work they needed to get their feet off the ground. For many, covering standards was the precise remedy for this limbo, but it also showed a side to them that seemed well plugged in and intelligent enough to try something that could easily fail.
At the same time, it reflected a broader ’60s trend few remember to take into account: the fact that, during this decade in particular, it was all about taking pre-existing things and making them appear different in a way that felt creative but also refreshed, like finding a book written decades ago and ripping out some of its pages for a contemporary rewrite. This might seem like a terrible idea in practice, but if it pulls at the right cultural threads and makes the story seem new, it usually works a charm.
And, in many instances, that’s exactly what happened. With the focus placed heavily on singles to bring in money, many musicians threw covers in the mix to push their own relevance. And sometimes, it took on a new meaning entirely, creating an independent subculture rooted in cultural significance, like Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, and how it became a symbol of feminism and civil rights. This also highlights another feature about ’60s covers that doesn’t happen so often today: the fact that, unless they were new takes on the standards, many covers were released ridiculously close to the original.
For instance, Franklin’s version came within a couple of years of Otis Redding’s, just as Gladys Knight’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ came just a year before Marvin Gaye’s. Jimi Hendrix got a hold of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ the following year, and The Animals snatched up ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ within a year of Nina Simone. Jefferson Airplane did the same with The Great Society’s ‘Somebody To Love’. The list goes on. But why? Well, at a glance, it’s simple: because if the cover was turned around quickly enough, it had good chances of exploding faster and bigger than the original.
And because labels, teams, publishers and the like absolutely loved the idea of getting there first, even if something wasn’t originally theirs, it meant less work and more payoff, satisfying the rush to make musicians famous as quickly as possible without having to work on new material. A lot of the time, it worked. How many people do you know who only know Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along The Watchtower’, or at least refer to that one first as their favourite? So, covers weren’t just a means of introducing audiences to new artists; they were also a sneaky way to play the game and appease the churn of radio stations.
At the same time, though, these weren’t just half-baked ideas. Yes, it pushed artists to move as quickly as possible, but it also raised the stakes, letting songwriters and performers alike take part in a broader competitive playground that only asked the best of them, even if it felt like, most of the time, the commercial gain was the only thing they were fighting for. For some, like The Beatles, these pathways lead to greater artistic freedom down the road, a necessary means to an end, before one day, it was you others looked to when lathering up their own magic.
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