Cliff Richard's "Donna"

I just listened to the first disc of a two-disc set of Cliff Richard, and I noticed two things about his cover of Ritchie Valens' "Donna."

At first, I just noticed that one of the lines could be written one of two ways.  Either "For I love my girl; Donna, where can you be?" or "For I love my girl, Donna; where can you be?"  There's a slight pause in the vocals after "girl," so the first rendering is more accurate, but the second is grammatically viable.  There's no major difference in meaning between the two; one just has "Donna" as a vocative (asking her where she is), and the other has "Donna" as an appositive (specifying that the girl whom the singer/speaker loves is Donna).

But then I realized that this line (along with some others) illustrates something else.  "For I love my girl; Donna, where can you be," "I had a girl; Donna was her name," and "Oh, well, Donna, now that you're gone" all have "Donna" in the middle of the line, which reflects how Donna is at the center of the singer/speaker's life and how her leaving is what he's most concerned about.

I briefly referenced Valens' original (I haven't gotten around to transcribing it yet), and while these two points also apply to his version, there are some slight lyrical differences between the two recordings.

Three Dog Night's "My Old Kentucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)"

I just listened to Three Dog Night's Seven Separate Fools.  I knew that part of "My Old Kentucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)" sounded familiar (the line "oh, the sun shines bright on our old Kentucky home"), but I couldn't place it.  I looked it up on the internet and discovered that "My Old Kentucky Home" (which contains a similar line - "the sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home") is a song by Stephen Foster.  I found this interesting, but that's not how I knew that line.

Eventually though, I realized that it's also in the song "Here Comes Summer," which I have by both Cliff Richard and the Dave Clark Five.  It's slightly altered though, so there's no mention of Kentucky; it's just "oh, let the sun shine bright on my happy summer home."

Listening to the two lines of both songs back-to-back, they sounded similar, not only in the words, but also in the melodies.  I found the notation for Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," and I'm fairly confident that both "My Old Kentucky Home (Turpentine and Dandelion Wine)," written by Randy Newman, and "Here Comes Summer," written by Jerry Keller, took Foster's melody (modifying it slightly) and at least some of his words.

Carl Perkins' "I Care"

Between yester-day and to-day, I listened to a two-disc compilation album of Carl Perkins called The Fabulous Carl Perkins.  The first two lines of "I Care" sounded really familiar - "Now you got me started / Don't you leave me broken-hearted."  It wasn't too hard to place these as lines that also appear in Cliff Richard's "Too Much" because I had just listened to a Cliff Richard compilation album a few days ago.

But I'm not sure what to make of these two lines' appearing identically in two different songs.  "I Care" is from 1957, and "Too Much" is from 1959, so if one was influenced by the other, it would be "Too Much" influenced by "I Care."  But I don't really think that's the case here.  I think it's just a weird coincidence that illustrates that a lot of the songs from the 1950s use a lot of the same elements.  I think rhyming started and broken-hearted was just pretty common back then, and the rest of the lines for these two songs just happened to be filled in with the same words.

Cliff Richard's "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care"

This morning I listened to a Cliff Richard compilation album titled Early Days.  In his version of "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care," I noticed that the lyric is "You don't know any dance steps that I knew."  I'm more familiar with Buddy Holly's version of the song (although he flips the parenthetical around and titles it "You're So Square (Baby I Don't Care)"), where the line is "You don't know any dance steps that I do."

Buddy Holly's version was recorded on 19 December 1957 and was released on his second album - titled Buddy Holly - in February 1958.  Cliff Richard's version was released on his first album - Cliff - in April 1959.  So the Buddy Holly version is older.

Because Early Days also includes Cliff Richard's versions of some Buddy Holly songs ("That'll Be the Day" and "That's My Desire") and some other songs (such as "I'll String along with You," "Little Things Mean a Lot," and his version of Gershwin's "Embraceable You" - all of which appear on his second album, Cliff Sings) venture into the orchestrated instrumentation that Buddy Holly also used (on songs such as "True Love Ways" and "Raining in My Heart"), I think it's safe to say that Cliff Richard was influenced by Buddy Holly.

It's quite possible that his changing "You don't know any dance steps that I do" to "You don't know any dance steps that I knew" is simply a mistake.  They heard "knew" instead of "do" when listening to the Buddy Holly version.  (Lyrical mishearings are pretty common.  On the Who's version of "Good Lovin'" from The BBC Sessions, the line is "I asked a famous doctor just what I had" instead of "I asked my family doctor" as it is in the Rascals' version.  Boyce and Hart's "Last Train to Clarksville" (famous by the Monkees) came out of mishearing the Beatles' "Paperback Writer," and the Zombies' "Time of the Season" came out of a mishearing of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "The Tracks of My Tears.")  Changing the line might just be an-other example of one artist's mishearing an-other.

Regardless of whether the change was intentional or not, it does affect the song.  "You don't know any dance steps that I knew" indicates that the singer/speaker has forgotten the dance steps that he used to know.  And the cause of his forgetting them is likely his spending time with the girl who's so square.  He hasn't been dancing, so he's forgotten the steps.  This situation gives the song a greater depth, and it illustrates a greater connection between the singer/speaker and the girl, where the Buddy Holly version - staying in the present tense - could seem more like an infatuation that will soon pass.

The changing of the parentheticals also seems to suggest this.  The more prominent title of Cliff Richard's version is "Baby I Don't Care," but the more prominent title of Buddy Holly's is "You're So Square."  For the singer/speaker in Buddy Holly's version, the significance is still on the girl's squareness, which could interfere with the relationship.