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Friday 10 #6

I was born to be a fiddler in an old-time string band

Edit: The Film Optimist also has a set of lyrics to guess!

Last week three people guessed seven! Seven seems to be the magic number for these. I suspect the other three…

  1. “Hanging on the Telephone,” made famous by Blondie, but originally by The Nerves
  2. “Telephone,” by Lady Gaga with Beyoncé
  3. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” made famous by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson, but originally by Al Hammond

… are really familiar. It’s interesting that so many songs made popular by big bands are covers.

Some songs are covered so much they become standards. That’s certainly the case with Blue Velvet (“Ours a love I held tightly, feeling the rapture glow”) which was originally a hit for Tony Bennett. But it was so instantly a standard that Bennett and three other acts had versions of it on the “Cash Box Top 50” chart.

If anything can ever be “instant classic,” “Blue Velvet” has to qualify. The video version I chose was a much older Bennett singing it in a duet with k.d. lang.

Bennett would build much of his career on interpreting the “Great American Songbook,” cutting many highly regarded and very successful albums of duets. He actually had two with Lady Gaga who can more than hold her own as a jazz singer.

One of the songs below was a hit for the original band, but the video I’ve included — which you can watch when it’s guessed — is a live performance by someone else.

Rules recap

  1. No searching for lyrics.
  2. I need both the song title and the artist.
  3. If you identify a cover I can recognize (or easily find), it counts.

Hey, mama, rock me:

This week’s lyrics:

  1. Times are gone for honest men, and sometimes far too long for snakes
    Black Hole Sun, Soundgarden
    Guessed by
    Sidney
  2. You can't go to the country, the country isn't there. It got chopped up and morgaged, and vanished into thin air
    Whatever It Was, Greg Brown
  3. He says his body's too old for working; his body's too young to look like his
    Fast Car, Tracy Chapman (covered by Luke Combs)
    Guessed by
    Mac Webb
  4. I could steer around the rocks, but they're busting down the docks
    James River Blues, Old Crow Medicine Show
  5. Oh Daddy dear, you know you're still number one
    Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper
    Guessed by
    Mac Webb
  6. No matter how they tossed the dice it had to be
    Happy Together, The Turtles
    Guessed by
    Glen
  7. To touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal
    Mysterious Ways, U2
    Guessed by
    Laszlo Hollyfeld
  8. Watch me unravel, I'll soon be naked
    Undone - The Sweater Song, Weezer
    Guessed by
    Mac Webb
  9. Now that we've parted, there's just one sound that I just can't stand
    I Can't Stand the Rain, Ann Peebles (Covered by Tina Turner)
    Guessed by
    Sidney
  10. Beep beep, who got the keys to the Jeep?
    The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), Missy Elliot
    Guessed by
    Sidney

Your guesses