The recent posts I made on Songs about Cars were a lot of fun, so I thought I’d follow them up by checking out some cover tunes. I did a series of posts back on the old blog called Got you Covered. I’m going to revive that format here and do some occasional posts featuring cover tunes that turn my crank for various reasons.

Right now I have the Steve Earle tribute album to the late Townes Van Zandt in my car CD player. If you haven’t heard it, and you like Townes, I think you’ll enjoy this CD a lot. Townes Van Zandt wrote some of the most gut-wrenching sad tunes I’ve ever heard. Here’s Steve Earle performing live what may be the saddest of them, Marie. If you’d like a comparison, here’s Townes playing the same tune. Here’s Steve Earle and his son, Justin Townes Earle playing another Van Zandt tune, Mr. Gold + Mr. Mudd.

On more of a rock ‘n roll note, here’s another favourite cover, Johnny Winter playing Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. There are countless covers around of Bob Dylan tunes. Another one I really like is the late R.L. Burnside’s version of Everything is Broken. Burnside was a tremendous bluesman. Here’s a Bob Dylan alternate version of his own tune.

The question of the day – What are your favourite cover songs? In the coming weeks, I’ll share a bunch more of mine.