Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music ed. by George Plasketes (review)

Let’s start by talking about terms. Play It Again, a fifteen-essay collection published as part of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, describes itself as ‘the first scholarly volume of critical perspectives on cover songs’ (p. 3). However, its contributors variously refer to its topic as ‘cover songs’, ‘cover versions’, ‘cover records’, ‘cover recordings’, ‘cover renditions’, ‘covers’, ‘versions’, ‘re-recordings’, ‘reworkings’, ‘remakes’, ‘recontextualizations’, ‘iterations’, ‘interpretations’, ‘translations’, ‘tributes’, ‘homages’, and ‘send-ups’. They also examine subcategories of this larger grouping such as ‘self-covers’ and ‘parodies’. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—this proliferation of terms, there seems to be fundamental confusion about what a cover (as I shall refer to it) is exactly. Editor George Plasketes defines covering as ‘the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer’s song’ (p. 1); ‘cover songs’ would therefore be the musical output of this practice—that is, one artist’s recording or performance of another composer’s song. But this term and its definition are problematic in two respects: that of roles and that of works.

With respect to roles, the definition suggests that recording and performing artists must write their own songs; indeed, a number of authors in this volume seem to privilege the Romantic ideal of the artist, as embodied in the model of the singer/songwriter. However, many artists do not fit this mould, including names as varied as Elvis Presley, Céline Dion, and Milli Vanilli. Yet we would not label all of their recordings and performances ‘covers’. Rather, ‘Hound Dog’ is considered to be a cover, but ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is not. The difference lies in the fact that ‘Hound Dog’ was recorded and released by Big Mama Thornton prior to being recorded by Presley, whereas Presley himself was the first to record ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

We might therefore amend our definition of a cover to be ‘one artist’s recording or performance of a song previously recorded and released by another artist’, but this raises a new set of questions. To begin, what exactly constitutes a ‘song’ or ‘work’ in popular music? Musicology has long considered the composition, as represented through the notated score, to be the central ‘work’ of Western art music. In popular music, however, songs have been replaced by recordings and performances as the central interest of critics and listeners. Scholars such as Andrew Kania, Allan Moore, and Albin Zak have pointed out that recordings and performances in popular music often do not refer back to any pre-existing ‘work’. Rather, they bring these very ‘works’ into being. As such, the singers, musicians, engineers, and producers who contribute to these recordings and performances all share credit for the ‘authorship’ of these works alongside the songwriters: it is just that their authorial contributions typically lie not in the manipulation of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic relationships through notated symbols, but in the materialization of timbral, textural, and spatial relationships among aural objects.

In this volume, however, the relationship between a song and a recording or performance of that song remains ill-defined. As such, there is a lack of clarity about what a cover is and how to refer to it, with the consequence that the authors, in their eagerness to show the prevalence of the practice, are at times unhelpfully broad in their application of the term, allowing that not just individual works but even musical styles and personae can be ‘covered’. Greg Metcalf, for example, suggests that the 2007 album Dylan Hears a Who, a collection of newly composed songs performed in the musical style of mid-1960s Bob Dylan recordings, are ‘covers’ of Dylan’s style (p. 184). Sheldon Schiffer suggests that even personae can be ‘covered’, as were those of the 1960s group of stage and film actors known as the Rat Pack in the Steven Soderbergh films Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen (p. 82).

However, the problems...