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Hey Joe, who Joe?
Some songs have such a strong connection with one particular recording artist that it is difficult for us to imagine them performed by anyone else. It is a shock for the obsessive listener, high up on their horse of music knowledge, to discover that the track that they claim shaped them early on, when everything else seemed to be spiralling off in its own bizarre direction during puberty, was actually an entirely different song before it fell into the hands of the musician that brought it to fame.
When I was going through my formative years one of the first records that I bought was The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced (1967). The disk is now close to ruin due to over-usage, and one track in particular got a beating: track 3, “Hey Joe”. The balanced contrast between the experimental prog-rock style that was so exquisitely perfected by Hendrix throughout his career, and the devastating subject matter of murder and abandonment conveyed through Hendrix’s deep velvet voice is so wonderfully entwined that it felt to me as though no other man, no other band, could ever play this song after Jimi. I later found out that not only had it been covered, but it had also been played and performed many times before. This was in fact the only track on the album that was not an original Hendrix creation - it had been acquired second hand. Despite this, “Hey Joe” was chosen as the single-release of the band’s debut album. It became wildly popular and is listed number 201 on Rolling Stones magazine’s 2005 list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. For the majority of the rock and roll world, this track will forever be associated with Jimi: the guitar guru of the ‘60s. But “Hey Joe” was in fact registered for copyright in the US in 1962 by Billy Roberts and the earliest known recording of the track is by the garage-band The Leaves in 1965. Authorship disputes surrounding “Hey Joe” still continue today.
So many of the world’s best known songs are covers: Cyndie Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was originally recorded in 1979 by mod dresser Robert Hazard, Aretha Franklin’s epic female empowerment ballad “Respect” was written by the charming - but very male - Otis Redding, the Clash’s attempt at a musical spit at the police, “I fought the Law” had a much softer edge in its original form in 1966 when it was performed by Bobby Fuller Four, and the list goes on. What does this mean, then, to find the source of a song that seemed so organically connected to one artist in another? Does it undermine the second hand (or voice in this case)? Does it make you, as a listener, doubt your ability to locate authenticity? Does it reveal the original artist to be a brilliant writer, but an inadequate performer - a martyr who lets their song live on through the performance of another?
Its seems to me that, in the same way that the works included in the MA Curating the Art Museum exhibition The Second Hand - Reworked Art Over Time have continued to be given new meaning and life through the touch of a second or third artist, so too must songs be allowed to say something new through their re-interpretation by a musician who finds something different in them, and if a song makes you question yourself, then there must be something significant about it!