You're listening to sound opinions and later in the show we're going to review the debut solo album from Jenny Beth who's the singer in one of our favorite bands

Savages and Jim you in particular have been eagerly awaiting this one.

I have Mr. Cot I'm not going to tip my hand because we'll

get into the context and our opinions later in the show. First though we are

revisiting an interview we conducted in 2018. Ray Padgett is a music writer and publicist who's run the

Cover Me blog since 2007. His blog highlights a wide variety of notable cover songs that span genres from soul to punk and everything in between.

He also wrote a book of the same theme called Cover Me, The Stories Behind the greatest cover songs of all time.

Welcome to the show, Ray.

Thanks for having me.

Ray, where does the term cover come from?

The term cover came around in the late 40s. The idea, basically, it was an industry thing where record labels would try to

Have their own version of a big hit so if Frank Sinatra or whoever has some massive hit, every record label would try to release a sound-alike version, the opposite of what we think of as a cover today where you make it your own, there's the opposite. They want it to sound exactly the the same and the idea was literally to cover the original record up in a store shelf

Maybe Frank Snatch is not a great example, but people back then maybe didn't know who sang every single song they heard on the radio.

They just knew the name of the song.

So, you know, Mood Indigo.

They'd say, I want to buy Mood Indigo.

And the record label clerk would just grab whatever version of Mood Indigo was sitting there.

Fun fact I learned to researching the book is that the Woolworth's department store chain

had its own record label, the entire purpose of which was to rip off pit songs and put them in their

record store so they made more money rather than selling the original.

Oh that's insidious. Wake up, little Susie, wake up.

We both big sound asleep.

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