Under the Covers

Today's post starts with a song composed by Rudy Clark, which was a minor hit for James Ray in 1962:

In 1962 a group of four youngsters from Liverpool, England were also starting their ascent up the charts.  One of them, George Harrison, was a fan of early American R&B and tried to no avail to get the group to record a cover of Ray's tune.

Some years later George Harrison got the opportunity himself and covered "I've Got my Mind Set on You" for his 1987 Album Cloud Nine.

Covers aren't only limited to rock and roll.  At a whopping fifteen-and-a-half minutes-plus, Herbie Hancock's Chameleon from his 1973 Head Hunters album was and still is full of fertile ground for nurturing that sincerest form of flattery; experimental electro-jazz at its finest.

Maynard Ferguson started with Stan Kenton and struck out on his own in 1957.  In 1974, Ferguson's cover of Chameleon solidified the tune's reputation as a modern jazz standard.

Otis Redding's tragic death at the age of 26 in an airplane crash left much of his work up to that point in some state of unfinish, or unreleased.  

One of Redding's songs released posthumously was "Hard to Handle," on the album "The Immortal Otis Redding:"

A cover of Hard to Handle was the breakthrough hit for brothers Chris and Rich Robinson and their band The Black Crowes, from their 1990 album Shake Your Moneymaker.