Cover Story #2: You Keep Me Hangin' On - The Supremes
For the second instalment of my covers playlists I'm going to look at another Holland-Dozier-Holland classic - You Keep Me Hangin' On, originally released in 1966 by the Supremes on Motown. I love Diana Ross' vocals and then there is the incredible backing track from the Motown inhouse session musicians The Funk Brothers, kicking off with possibly my favourite riff of all time backed up by a classic driving bassline (there's an instrumental version by the Funk Brothers on the playlist too).
A lot of covers of this song tend to copy the backing track pretty faithfully - of the more straightforward covers I think Jackie Wilson's poweful vocals make it my favourite. Aretha Franklin's version from 2014 feels a bit unnecessary, as much as she does a great job of putting her own spin on the vocals. American country singer Reba McEntire also released a fairly close copy of the original in 1995 - I don't hate her vocals but it has a different production style which I'm not really a fan of, including a jazzy middle 8 and some very glitzy lead guitar.
There's also the version by Dianna Agron from the TV show Glee which is notably at an even higher tempo than the original but is otherwise unremarkable.
At the end of the playlist I've also included covers by three boring British singers of a certain age - Tom Jones and Phil Collins versions are basically just karaoke and Rod Stewart's version inexplicably is seven and a half minutes long and no jury will convict you if you skip it (or the other two, unless you have a particular fondness for their voices).
The more interesting ones go in a different direction - often inspired by one-hit-wonder proto-metal 60s group Vanilla Fudge's version which was hugely successful when released in 1968 that takes elements of the original but slows the whole song down significantly.
Subsequent covers taking inspiration from this include Wilson Pickett's version released three years later which is a lot more stripped back and puts much more emphasis on his vocals. The Box Tops version goes for a similar stripped back instrumental approach but the vocals are strangely muted.
Legendary Jamaican singer Ken Boothe's version keeps the intro but then swaps out the backing for a traditional reggae beat while British jazz/reggae group Jazz Jamaica's version has more of a ska flavour, with the Madness rendition falling somewhere in the middle.
Finally we have the 80s-ified versions - the first of which is Kim Wilde's 1986 cover which made the song one of only six in the 20th Century to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 when recorded by two different artists (the original also topped the charts on initial release). Wilde's version is takes almost none of the original instrumentation and is in a genre I don't usually enjoy but I still really like it - English electronic band Colourbox also have a very synth heavy version which is a bit too long and has vocals which sound too close to Diana Ross' original.
There are a lot more songs here that give The Supremes a run for their money but I think they still come out on top.