Famous Interpreters Who Were Famously Interpreted: Nilsson Types

what did Marianne Faithfull write

i was referring to it being a good catch re: a song by jagger/richards someone else made famous, if that's why you're asking

if the criteria is 'ppl who had a hit w/ a cover and also had other ppl hit w/ a cover of a song they wrote' that's a long as fuck list, if it's 'ppl who's biggest hit by far as a performer was a cover and whose biggest hit by far as a songwriter came via someone else's cover (w/ the cover dwarfing the original's success)' that's a much shorter list, esp if you add the caveat that both hits had to be genuinely big hits. nilsson obv w/o question (w/ some wiggle room for biggest hit even), badfinger very possibly (though you could argue that 'come and get it' isn't their biggest hit), neil diamond not really.

it's the former, and i don't think it's actually that long-as-fuck a list

well this is a really anal thread then huh

oh don't be sour grapes over "proud mary"

People we've mentioned so far who wrote a song someone else made famous and made someone else's song famous:

Nilsson ("Everybody's Talkin'"/"One")
Neil Diamond ("You Don't Bring Me Flowers Any More"/"I'm A Believer")
Willie Nelson ("Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain"/"Crazy")
Lennon/McCartney (pick one/"I Wanna Be You Man")
Ian Hunter ("All The Young Dudes"/"Ships")
*Mel Torme (actually what was this guy's hit that wasn't already a standard? before my time/"The Christmas Song")
*Mike Nesmith (actually did he sing lead on any monkees hit he didn't write?/"Different Drum")
Bobby Darin (a Hardin Cover/a song Hardin covered)
Tim Hardin (a Darin cover/a song Darin covered)
Springsteen ("Jersey Girl"/"Blinded By The Light")
Paul Simon ("Scarborough Fair"/"Red Rubber Ball")
Jagger/Richards ("It's All Over Now"/"As Tears Go by")

yeah if you add 'made the song famous' it's not that long i guess, otherwise you're just talking about songwriters who were or became performers and then eventually had a hit w/ someone else's song. this doesn't seem as common as it used to be - ppl don't interpret songs and ppl don't give songs away - and the songwriter -> performer path in country isn't as firm as it was (though it still exists in r&b).

Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" for Costello maybe? Though Costello's version came afterward.

wyatt's went top 40 before costello had released it, i'd say it counts

yeah nesmith as far as i can tell wrote the monkees hits he sang (and a surprising number he didn't sing as well eg. 'mary, mary', 'daily, nightly'). chill bro.

*Mike Nesmith (actually did he sing lead on any monkees hit he didn't write?/"Different Drum")
Shit, I dunno?

xpost

'ppl who had a hit w/ a cover and also had other ppl hit w/ a cover of a song they wrote'

don't get how Proud Mary doesn't qualify then?

CCR hit #2 with "Proud Mary" a few years later, Ike & Tina hit #4 with a cover. Ike & Tina did not make "Proud Mary" famous.

yeah by this criteria it counts, i think the songs that were clearly written for someone else and then the songwriter went 'o, since it hit i guess i'll do my own version as well' are somewhat different than yr trad covers.

but you never said that anywhere is the thing

yeah i can't remember who it was (my gut tells me springsteen) but someone got fogerty to perform ccr live again by telling him if he didn't ppl were gonna start thinking of 'proud mary' as a tina turner song.

just in case anyone's getting lost in the semantics, let's tighten the concept to "made someone else's song famous and wrote a song someone else made famous"

― da croupier, Monday, October 22, 2012 6:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf that original post does bounce between 'made famous' and merely 'had a hit w/ a cover'. ie the beatles didn't make any of their covers famous (in america at least).

sorry guess I'll go start a "Are there any other singer/songwriters who had a degree of success singing songs by others and having their songs sung by others...but one of the songs involved was already famous initially" thread

i apologize if i was vague in my initial post but i didn't mean to leave the door open to Elton's "Lucy IN The Sky" hits.

haha yeah do what you gotta do to keep him out. I've only heard of about 1/2 of these famous songs, so the criteria w/r/t fame seemed pretty loose overall.

i feel your pain

B.J. Thomas first recorded "Here You Come Again" by Mann/Weil, but Dolly Parton made it a hit. Whitney's version of "I Will Always Love You" is more famous worldwide than Parton's own version.

Gene Pitney aproaches balls' criteria. His biggest hits were by others, but he only wrote the second or third biggest hits for The Crystals and Ricky Nelson.

Jackie De Shannon's biggest hit was by Bacharach / David "What the World Needs Now" (is it an interpretation if she recorded it first?), and she co-wrote "Bette Davis Eyes", Kim Carnes biggest hit.

now that da croupier has tightened up the rules, my brain has given up.

thought bowie was a candidate but 'sorrow' wasn't a hit in the us (and while it was a hit in the uk so was the original). there are album cuts that are covers and more well known than the original but i don't really think you can call 'it's not easy' a hit.

i don't know why you'd be bothered by the tightening, zachary (which honestly i meant from the get go) - pitney and de shannon still fit the bill!

whitney's version is the bigger hit but it was already a hit before that (dolly even revived it apropos of nothing in the best little whorehouse in texas). thought bobbie gentry might qualify but she actually had a pretty big hit w/ 'fancy' if nowhere near as huge as reba did.

yeah my second criteria was tighter than croup's, those totally fit.

So I guess Lowe's "Switchboard Susan" cover is deemed "not famous enough"? (I'll buy that, if so; just trying to keep score.)

yeah sorry i meant to mention that - "some airplay in detroit" is a little too low a bar, "shipbuilding" at least was a top 40 hit (rough trade records' first!)

kinda weird that 'shipbuilding' is the best cover of costello candidate by far cuz that is one dude who really has worked to be on this thread

Smokey Robinson wrote tons of hits for other Motown artists of course, and he also had a hit with Holland, Dozier, Holland's "Mickey's Monkey".

Kirsty MacColl - her biggest hit Billy Bragg's "A New England" ; wrote Tracy Ullman's biggest hit "They Don't Know About Us"

wondering if there's enough incidences of 'ppl scoring a hit w/ a cover while somewhat simultaneously someone is scoring a hit w/ a cover of them' or if that's just hall & oates. beatles and stones probably fit here too.

John Phillips might count for Dedicated to the One I Love and Kokomo. Although the original was already famous, and I think there was even a thread here about which one you think of first.

Toni Wine co-wrote "A Groovy Kind of Love," transatlantic smash hit for Wayne Fontana; then as one of The Archies she sang on the number one hit "Sugar Sugar," a song written by Jeff Barry/Andy Kim... although Andy Kim sang on it also.

warren zevon only charted twice, and one of them was his version of allen toussaint's "a certain girl." the most famous version of zevon's "poor poor pitiful me" is linda ronstadt's cover.

Henry Mancini more or less belongs here. His biggest recording ever was "Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet," a Nino Rota composition. (Granted, it had already been heard in the popular film).

Several years earlier he had written "Moon River" for Breakfast at Tiffany's of which it seems Andy Williams' contemporaneous cover seems to be the most famous version.

John Phillips might count for Dedicated to the One I Love and Kokomo. Although the original was already famous, and I think there was even a thread here about which one you think of first.

i thought about this myself (phillips also wrote that "when you go to san francisco wear a flower in your hair" jam) but "dedicated"(a #3 for the shirelles) and all their cover singles were already hits

balls ref'd hall & oates and i'm not sure if they qualify. hall wrote "electric blue" for icehouse (and "every time you go" was a deep cut before paul young found it) but did they have a cover hit other than that motown medley?

oh and the righteous brothers one, but those are all chestnuts

i am horrified to learn that kenny loggins qualifies because while he co-wrote "what a fool believes" HE DID NOT WRITE "DANGER ZONE." wtf i had no idea, the fraud.

I feel as if Barry ("I Write the Songs" but not this one) Manilow and Louis Armstrong belong here too, but I can't prove it. What Manilow song was made famous by someone else first?

actually does it count if you co-wrote a song with the guy who made it famous? supposedly the loggins & messina version of "danny's song" got a lot of play even if anne murray took it up the charts, so i don't want to give it to him for that. in general i've been using whichever version is at the top of a song's wikipedia page as the one that made it famous.

ok apparently loggins & messina's version of "a love song" was released the same year as anne murray's hit version and got far less attention so i guess kenny passes

On the Nesmith question, he never had a lead vocal on one of the hits, but I would argue that "What Am I Doing Hangin' 'Round" (written by Nesmith's ex-bandmate Michael Martin Murphey and Boomer Castleman) was pretty well known at the time. It was the B-side to "Mary Mary" and got showcased as the only featured song in two episodes of the series (and shared a third episode with "Daydream Believer"); I wouldn't be surprised if it got some airplay because of that.

I think the only Nesmith Monkees hit was "Tapioca Tundra" which inched into the Top 40 as a bside. "Love Is Only Sleeping" was earmarked as a single, but dropped in favor of it's intended flip, "Daydream Beliver". Nez also was respnsible for their final charting items of the '60s: "Good Clean Fun" and "Listen To The Band"

Nah, he wrote Mary Mary too. Which might possibly be better known these days from the Run DMC version I guess.

But those are all songs that Nesmith wrote--"Hangin' 'Round" is the only (semi-)famous one he didn't write. That, plus Linda Rondstadt's hit cover of "Different Drum," makes a pair fit for the thread topic.

For Elvis Costello, he did get some airplay on New York FM radio with his cover of Betty Everett's "Getting Mighty Crowded"; the original was not a hit in the U.S., though it may have been in the U.K. And for someone else having the hit with an Elvis song, how about Dave Edmunds' version of "Girls Talk"?