Remakes Or Originals? It Depends On What Sounds The Best

As a music listener, I've heard many songs done through the years by a number of singers. Somewhere along the way, a singer's career goes so many years, and therefore, that artist might be recording so many albums. And along with albums come the singles which often get radio play beforehand. With that process, I might see a long-time artist tend to do a remake of a song. Sometimes it's a remake of a piece that was previously a big hit for said artist. Other times, you'll have something that wasn't a hit at all the first time, and it'd become a hit after the second recording. In the music scene, you have a variety of different scenarios.

Basically, whenever I post YouTubes on our Music forums, I always try to look for original material, particularly in things like country music (So you know, classic country is my main specialty). To some folks, it might not make a whole lot of difference, for as long as the singer sings it, well, that's all that matters, as they'd say. End of discussion. To me and others, however, a song done a certain way does matter. I can think of a number of singers: Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Johnny Rodriguez, Charley Pride, Conway Twitty, George Strait, Ray Price, and many more. All of the ones I've mentioned had long careers. All have done remakes of original works at one time or another. Whether a recorded remake is done just to update an artist's sound is immaterial to me. With a few exceptions here and there, I generally don't care for remakes, because nine times out of ten, the original work of many songs often strikes a chord with me ( Sorry. Couldn't resist... ) as the definitive version of a song. Keep in mind that I'm only talking about one single artist doing multiple versions of one song, not one song being done by many artists (and we've certainly had lots of that going on, but that's another post).

You can compare versions of this song and that song and draw your own conclusions. I often think of country legend Eddy Arnold, who had an incredibly long career in the genre. He had songs from the 1940s that got rerecorded in the the '50s and again in the '60s. I've heard different versions of some of his hit songs, and chances are, it might be a different scenario from one to another. What I should do is more research on these songs, as I've only thought of them recently.

So it really depends on what the best version of a particular piece sounds like to an individual. With me, many times, the original song is still the best.