4 Cover Songs From 1971 That Did a Lot of Damage on the Pop Charts

No matter what year on the calendar you happen to choose, chances are you’re going to find a bunch of cover songs that did very well with pop music audiences. 1971 certainly followed that trend.

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If anything, 1971 offered a wider variety of cover songs than usual, many of which did very well on the charts. Here are four that you might remember from that year.

“Go Away, Little Girl” by Donny Osmond

Donny Osmond couldn’t miss in 1971. He was only 13 years old for much of the year, but that didn’t stop him from dominating the pop charts. With The Osmonds, he knocked out a No. 1 hit with “One Bad Apple”. Just for good measure, he added a solo No. 1 with “Go Away, Little Girl”. By the time Osmond got hold of it, the song had made the rounds throughout the 60s. Considering it was written by the unassailable pair of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, you knew the song would have good bones. The crooner Steve Lawrence, of Steve & Eydie fame, made it a No. 1 in 1963, a year after it was first recorded by Bobby Vee, eight years before Osmond’s success.

“Me And Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin’s recording of “Me And Bobby McGee” took the world by storm a few months after her death in October 1970. Supposedly, Kris Kristofferson had no clue that Joplin had even recorded it until after the fact. Roger Miller, of “King Of The Road” fame, was actually the first to record the song. Bob Neuwirth, who made his name by running with Bob Dylan in the 60s, taught it to Joplin. She transformed the song with her performance. Kristofferson had envisaged it as a twilight lament for lost love. Joplin, imbuing the song with wild bursts of bluesy energy, gets a cathartic jolt out of it, making sure no one can miss her regret at letting Bobby go.

“You’ve Got A Friend” by James Taylor

The overlap here is fascinating. Carole King and James Taylor were recording albums at the same time when Taylor heard “You’ve Got A Friend” in King’s sessions. Meanwhile, King wrote the song, in part, as a response of sorts to Taylor’s “Fire And Rain”. Where Taylor’s narrator expressed despair, King’s song is a show of support. King managed to squeak the song out first on Tapestry in early 1971. But because she didn’t release it as a single, it left the door wide open for Taylor, who sang backup on King’s take, to come out with a version of his own. And it became one of his biggest ever hits, reaching the No. 1 spot in the US.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by Joan Baez

We should probably be grateful that Joan Baez’s reading of The Band’s classic about the Civil War made such an impression on the pop chart. After all, The Band released a ton of wonderful music that was ignored by pop radio. But the version that Baez released didn’t do the song a lot of justice. Remember that this was before the days when artists could easily look the song up on the internet. As a result, Baez simply sang the words as she heard them, errors and all. It’s also a somewhat lumbering version of the song, nothing compared to the urgent take done first by The Band. Nonetheless, Baez took “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” all the way to No. 3, by far the highest-charting rendition of a Band song.

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