Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers

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Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers: When a cover version becomes culturally dominant, the original recording can vanish from popular memory — even when the “original” was itself a hit, a Grammy winner, or the work of a legendary artist. The cases below are among the most thoroughly documented examples in popular-music history. Each entry lists the original artist and year, the famous cover and year, the reason the original tends to be forgotten, and the chart and cultural footprint of both versions.

1. “I Will Always Love You” — Dolly Parton (1974) → Whitney Houston (1992) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written and recorded by Dolly Parton at RCA Studio B in Nashville on June 12, 1973, and released as a single on March 11, 1974, from her album Jolene. Parton wrote it as a farewell to her mentor and TV partner Porter Wagoner when she left his syndicated show to go solo. The original topped Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart on June 8, 1974, then a re-recording for the 1982 soundtrack The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas sent the song to No. 1 country a second time — making Parton the first artist to reach No. 1 with the same song twice.

Famous cover: Whitney Houston’s pop-ballad arrangement, produced by David Foster for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, was released in October 1992. It spent 14 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (a then-record), was certified Diamond by the RIAA, topped charts in more than 30 countries, and is the best-selling single by a woman in U.S. history. It won Houston Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female in 1994.

Why listeners miss the original: Houston’s arrangement — a slow a cappella opening that explodes into Foster’s orchestral build — bears almost no resemblance to Parton’s gentle country reading. Because Parton has so many self-written hits, casual listeners assume “I Will Always Love You” is simply a Houston original written for the film. Parton’s manager Danny Nozell has said, “One thing we found out from American Idol is that most people don’t know that Dolly Parton wrote it.”

Cultural impact: Parton’s 1974 version won the 1975 CMA Female Vocalist of the Year award and was ranked the No. 1 country love song of all time by Billboard. Elvis Presley wanted to record it in 1974, but Parton famously refused after Colonel Tom Parker demanded half the publishing — a decision that paid off when Houston’s cover later made her the song’s 100% writer/publisher of a global blockbuster.

2. “Respect” — Otis Redding (1965) → Aretha Franklin (1967) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Otis Redding and released as a single on August 15, 1965, on the Stax/Volt label, drawn from his third album Otis Blue / Otis Redding Sings Soul. Redding’s horn-driven version reached No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 on the Hot R&B Singles chart, becoming his second-largest pop crossover hit at the time.

Famous cover: Aretha Franklin recorded her radically reworked version on Valentine’s Day 1967 at Atlantic Studios in New York, with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, producer Jerry Wexler, and her sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin on backing vocals. Released on April 16, 1967, it hit No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 (two weeks) and the R&B chart, won two Grammys in 1968, and was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (2002) and the Grammy Hall of Fame (1987). Rolling Stone ranked it No. 1 on its 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Why listeners miss the original: Franklin’s version contains the song’s most iconic hooks — the spelled-out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” the “sock it to me” backing vocals, the “TCB” line, and the King Curtis–style sax bridge (lifted from Sam & Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby”) — none of which appear in Redding’s original. She also reversed the gender perspective. The song became so identified with feminism and civil rights that the original now sounds like a different composition. Redding himself joked at the Monterey Pop Festival that “a girl took this song away from me.”

Cultural impact: Redding’s original sold respectably but never escaped the R&B niche; Franklin’s sold over 3.5 million copies, reached No. 10 in the UK, and became the defining anthem of second-wave feminism and the civil-rights era.

3. “Hound Dog” — Big Mama Thornton (1953) → Elvis Presley (1956) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (then 19 years old) for blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, recorded August 13, 1952, in Los Angeles with bandleader Johnny Otis, and released by Peacock Records in late February 1953. Thornton’s version spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and sold over 500,000 copies. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame (2013) and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (2016), and it ranks No. 318 on Rolling Stone‘s 2021 500 Greatest Songs list — replacing Presley’s version in the rankings.

Famous cover: Elvis Presley’s RCA recording from July 1956 (catalog RCA 6604) sold an estimated 10 million copies worldwide, simultaneously topped the U.S. pop, country and R&B charts, and held No. 1 on the pop chart for 11 weeks — a record that stood for 36 years. Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988.

Why listeners miss the original: Thornton’s version was an R&B record marketed to Black audiences on the “Chitlin’ Circuit”; it received almost no pop-radio airplay in segregated 1950s America. Presley actually learned the song not from Thornton’s recording but from Freddie Bell and the Bellboys’ lounge-act rewrite (which added the “you ain’t never caught a rabbit” lyrics), which Presley saw in Las Vegas in spring 1956. The sanitized, up-tempo Bell/Presley arrangement bears little resemblance to Thornton’s slow, growling blues — and Presley’s enormous fame eclipsed Thornton’s commercially. Thornton later told NME, “That song must have sold two million copies — and I was paid one check for 500 dollars, and never another cent.”

4. “Tainted Love” — Gloria Jones (1964) → Soft Cell (1981) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Ed Cobb (formerly of the Four Preps) and recorded by 18-year-old American R&B singer Gloria Jones in 1964, with Glen Campbell on lead guitar. Released as the B-side of her 1965 single “My Bad Boy’s Comin’ Home,” it failed to chart in either the U.S. or the U.K. It later became a Northern Soul club favorite in England after DJ Richard Searling brought a copy back from Philadelphia in 1973, and Jones re-recorded it in 1976 (produced by her boyfriend Marc Bolan of T. Rex) — again without charting.

Famous cover: British synth-pop duo Soft Cell (Marc Almond and Dave Ball) released their drastically rearranged electronic version on July 7, 1981, on their album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. It hit No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart (September 5, 1981), was the UK’s best-selling single of 1981 (1.05 million UK copies that year; 1.35 million by 2017), and reached No. 8 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 — where it spent a then-record 43 weeks on the chart. It also went to No. 1 in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany and South Africa.

Why listeners miss the original: Soft Cell completely re-imagined the song — slowing the tempo, dropping the key from C to G, replacing horns, guitars and drums with synthesizers and rhythm machines, and turning a Motown-style stomper into a brooding electronic dirge. Jones’s original was never a hit in any market, so most listeners have never heard it. VH1 ranked Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” No. 5 on its 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 1980s. Even Jones has said she considers Soft Cell’s version the definitive one.

5. “Hurt” — Nine Inch Nails (1994) → Johnny Cash (2002) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Trent Reznor and released as the closing track of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 album The Downward Spiral. Issued to radio as a promotional single on April 17, 1995, it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Song in 1996 and has since been ranked No. 2 on Kerrang!‘s list of the greatest NIN songs and No. 3 on Billboard‘s.

Famous cover: Johnny Cash’s stripped-down acoustic version, produced by Rick Rubin for American IV: The Man Comes Around, released in November 2002. Mark Romanek’s accompanying music video — featuring footage of Cash’s life and his ailing wife June Carter Cash — won the 2003 CMA Video of the Year, the 2004 Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, and was later voted the best music video of all time by NME in July 2011. Cash died on September 12, 2003, six months after the single’s release, lending the recording the quality of an epitaph.

Why listeners miss the original: Cash changed Reznor’s lyric “I wear this crown of shit” to “crown of thorns,” stripped away the industrial-rock distortion, and recorded the song as a frail confessional. Country fans who encountered the song through Cash often have no exposure to industrial rock; conversely, NIN’s original was an album-closing track on a notoriously bleak record, not a pop hit. Reznor himself told Alternative Press, “That song isn’t mine anymore,” and called Cash’s recording the song’s true version once he saw the video.

6. “Nothing Compares 2 U” — The Family (1985) → Sinéad O’Connor (1990) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Prince in 1984 and recorded for the self-titled 1985 debut album by The Family, one of Prince’s Paisley Park side projects (lead vocal by “St. Paul” Peterson). It was never released as a single and the album sold poorly; the Family disbanded shortly afterward. Prince’s own 1984 demo wasn’t released until 2018.

Famous cover: Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor recorded the song for her 1990 second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, with co-producer Nellee Hooper and Japanese musician Gota Yashiki on arrangement. Released as a single in January 1990, it hit No. 1 in the UK (four weeks), Ireland (six weeks), the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 (four weeks beginning April 21, 1990), and roughly two dozen other countries. Billboard named it the No. 1 World Single of 1990 at its first Billboard Music Awards, and the John Maybury–directed video won three MTV Video Music Awards including Video of the Year — making O’Connor the first female artist to win that prize.

Why listeners miss the original: The Family’s version was an album cut by a forgotten Prince side project that never hit any chart. O’Connor and Hooper completely rebuilt the song around her voice with a minimal, swirling synth bed, and Maybury’s intimate close-up video — featuring O’Connor’s real tears when she sang the “all the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard” lyric (a reference to her late mother) — made the performance feel like a brand-new, deeply personal composition. Prince’s name was on the songwriting credit but not on the recording.

7. “Killing Me Softly with His Song” — Lori Lieberman (1972) → Roberta Flack (1973) → Fugees (1996) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel, written in collaboration with 20-year-old singer Lori Lieberman after she saw Don McLean perform “Empty Chairs” at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in late 1971. Lieberman recorded the first version for her 1972 self-titled Capitol Records debut. Her gentle folk-pop reading did not chart, and Fox and Gimbel did not assign her a songwriting credit.

Famous covers: Roberta Flack heard Lieberman’s version on an in-flight audio program in 1972, worked up her own arrangement on tour with Quincy Jones, and released her version in January 1973. It spent five non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, won the 1974 Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The Fugees’ hip-hop reinvention, with Lauryn Hill on lead, was released April 23, 1996 on The Score; it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart, was the best-selling single of 1996 in the UK (No. 1 for five weeks), won the 1997 Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and has been certified 3× Platinum by the RIAA.

Why listeners miss the original: Lieberman’s version was an unassuming folk-pop track that never charted; Flack’s reinvention — slower, more soulful, with that immediately iconic opening — eclipsed it within months. Fox and Gimbel later publicly downplayed Lieberman’s role in the song’s creation, a stance Don McLean and Roberta Flack both refuted. Most listeners today encounter either Flack’s 1973 version or the Fugees’ 1996 version and don’t realize either is a cover.

8. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — Robert Hazard (1979 demo) → Cyndi Lauper (1983) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Philadelphia new-wave artist Robert Hazard in 1979 and recorded only as a demo — from a male perspective, with lyrics describing what he wanted to do with girls. The demo was never released commercially. Hazard was a local hero in Pennsylvania (his 1981 EP Escalator of Life sold 50,000 copies in Pennsylvania alone) but never broke nationally.

Famous cover: Producer Rick Chertoff brought the song to Cyndi Lauper for her debut solo album She’s So Unusual (1983), and Hazard agreed to let Lauper rewrite the lyrics from a female perspective — turning it into an anthem of female solidarity. Released as her debut single in September 1983, it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, hit the Top 10 in over 25 countries, and the Edd Griles–directed music video won the first-ever MTV Video of the Year Award at the inaugural 1984 VMAs. The video has crossed one billion views on YouTube.

Why listeners miss the original: Hazard’s version was never officially released as a finished single; it lived only as a demo. Lauper’s rewrite was so thorough — different gender perspective, different vocal performance, ’80s synth-pop production — that most listeners have no way of knowing the song came from a Philadelphia bar-rock artist. When Lauper claimed in early interviews to have co-written the song, Hazard’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter; the publishing royalties later made him wealthy enough to buy a lake house and horse farm.

9. “Black Magic Woman” — Fleetwood Mac (1968) → Santana (1970) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written by Peter Green, founding guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, inspired by his girlfriend Sandra “Magic Mamma” Elsdon. Released as Fleetwood Mac’s second single on March 29, 1968 (B-side: a cover of Elmore James’s “The Sun Is Shining”). The original blues-based arrangement, with Green’s understated Les Paul tone, peaked at No. 37 on the UK Singles Chart and did not chart in the U.S.

Famous cover: Santana’s Latin-rock reworking, with Gregg Rolie on lead vocals and an instrumental introduction adapted from Gábor Szabó’s “Gypsy Queen,” opened their 1970 album Abraxas and was released as the album’s first single. It reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 in Canada, and it has remained a classic-rock radio staple ever since. Both Fleetwood Mac and Santana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the same night in 1998; Peter Green joined Santana onstage to play it at the ceremony.

Why listeners miss the original: Fleetwood Mac in the late 1960s was a British blues band — a completely different group, with no women and no pop hits, from the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks lineup most Americans know. Santana’s arrangement added congas, timbales, organ and Carlos Santana’s signature sustained lead guitar, transforming a moody minor-key blues into an Afro-Cuban rock anthem in a different key center. Even Fleetwood Mac themselves had to start announcing onstage that they had written the song first.

10. “Torn” — Lis Sørensen (1993) / Ednaswap (1995) → Natalie Imbruglia (1997) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written in 1991 by American songwriters Scott Cutler and Anne Preven with English producer Phil Thornalley. The first commercial recording was by Danish singer Lis Sørensen in 1993, sung in Danish as “Brændt” (“Burned”). The first English-language release was by Cutler and Preven’s own L.A. alt-rock band Ednaswap in 1995, on their self-titled debut for EastWest — a riff-driven, grungy arrangement. Norwegian-American singer Trine Rein covered the English version in 1996 (a No. 10 hit in Norway), and her arrangement directly inspired Imbruglia’s.

Famous cover: Australian singer/actress Natalie Imbruglia recorded the song with producer Phil Thornalley (one of the original writers) for her debut album Left of the Middle, released November 17, 1997. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart for 11 consecutive weeks, No. 2 in the UK (where it spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the airplay chart), No. 1 in Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Spain and Sweden, sold more than 4 million physical copies worldwide (over 1 million in the UK alone), and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Why listeners miss the original: Ednaswap was an underground alt-rock band whose 1995 album was never widely released; the Danish-language version isn’t accessible to most English-speakers; and Imbruglia’s version — produced by one of the song’s original co-writers — is essentially the song’s first mass-market English release. The song became so identified with Imbruglia (a former Neighbours soap-opera star) that the 2017–18 viral discovery that “Torn” was a cover became its own social-media meme.

11. “Red Red Wine” — Neil Diamond (1967) → UB40 (1983 / 1988) (Fans Are Shocked To Discover These Songs Are Covers)

Original: Written and recorded by Neil Diamond for his second album Just for You (Bang Records, 1967), produced by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. As a melancholy ballad about drinking to forget heartbreak, Diamond’s single peaked at only No. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1968. A reggae-style cover by Jamaican-born singer Tony Tribe reached No. 46 in the UK in 1969 and became Trojan Records’ first chart hit.

Famous cover: British reggae group UB40 recorded a reggae arrangement for their 1983 covers album Labour of Love. Released as a single on August 8, 1983, it hit No. 1 in the UK that year and No. 34 in the U.S. After UB40 performed it at the 1988 Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Concert at Wembley, Phoenix radio programmer Guy Zapoleon added the full version (with Astro’s toasted “rap” verse) to KZZP’s rotation; A&M re-released the track, and it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 15, 1988 — five years after its original release.

It has sold over a million copies in the UK (certified by the Official Charts Company in 2014) and is ranked No. 134 on the UK’s all-time best-selling singles list.

Why listeners miss the original: UB40 themselves didn’t realize it was a Neil Diamond song. Lead vocalist Ali Campbell said they only knew Tony Tribe’s reggae version: “Even when we saw the writing credit which said ‘N Diamond,’ we thought it was a Jamaican artist called Negus Diamond.” Diamond’s original is a brooding pop ballad in a completely different style; UB40’s lilting, sing-along reggae arrangement bears little audible resemblance to it. Diamond has called UB40’s version one of his favorite covers and now performs the song live in UB40’s reggae style.

A Note on “Cover” Boundaries and Source Reliability

Two of the cases above sit at the edge of the standard cover definition. Robert Hazard’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” existed only as an unreleased demo when Cyndi Lauper recorded it; some music historians prefer to call her version the first commercial release rather than a cover. Similarly, “Nothing Compares 2 U” was an album cut by a Prince-produced side project — not a Prince single — so some sources frame it as O’Connor introducing an unknown song. Both are nonetheless classified as covers in standard reference works (Wikipedia, SecondHandSongs, Billboard) because earlier commercial recordings exist.

Chart and certification figures throughout are drawn from primary chart bodies (Billboard, the Official Charts Company, RIAA) and recognized music-history sources (Library of Congress National Recording Registry citations, Grammy Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Yale University Library exhibitions, Wikipedia entries cross-referenced with Songfacts, Rolling Stone, NME, and contemporary music journalism from MusicRadar, Stereogum, American Songwriter, Ultimate Classic Rock, The Ringer, and Loudwire). Where sources disagreed — for example, on Otis Redding’s original chart peak (No. 35 Hot 100 / No. 4 R&B) or on the precise number of weeks Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” held No. 1 (14 weeks is the consistently cited figure) — the most authoritative source (Billboard or the Official Charts Company) was preferred.

Complete Sources and References

Primary Chart Data

Industry Awards and Recognition

“I Will Always Love You”

“Respect”

“Hound Dog”

“Tainted Love”

“Hurt”

“Nothing Compares 2 U”

“Killing Me Softly with His Song”

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun”

“Black Magic Woman”

“Torn”

“Red Red Wine”

George Millington
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