zzvh | Second Hand Songs

In this column: second hand songs.com, Bastien and Mathieu de Zutter and Denis Monsieur, boll weevil (Song, Blues), Jaybird Coleman, Leadbelly (photo), The weavers, Shocking Blue, Venus, The Banjo Song, Oh! Suzanna, The Big Three, Stephen Foster, Kokomo Blues, Sweet Home Chicago

The American Time Magazine already called site 'secondhandsongs' the best place on the internet to find out everything about covers.

Second Hand Songs

In this episode I would like to highlight a website that makes an important contribution to the origin and history of songs.

SecondHandSongs is a collaborative website that maintains a global database of mainly cover versions of original works. It also contains information about adaptations and samples. The website allows performers and volunteer curators to add songs and update their metadata. It includes links to freely accessible recordings of the covers, and external identifiers for those works and performances in other databases (Wikipedia).
The website was founded in Belgium by the brothers Bastien and Mathieu de Zutter and Denis Monsieur. It was launched on April 11, 2003.

As of 2021, it included roughly a million covers of 100,000 original works, and was cross-referenced by MusicBrainz.

"Sometimes it's crazy," says Bastien De Zutter from Leuven, who started the database in 2003 together with his brother Mathieu and friend Denis Monsieur. "But we make it a point of honor that all artists and songs on our site are linked to each other and that all information is actually correct, which is not always the case with other cover sites. We started it out of frustration that in the charts you always should be the same, but it is almost impossible to find out who copied which song from whom. Many people think that it detracts from a song, but we think that is the nice thing about it."

Screenshots Second Hand Songs | Kokomo Blues versions

From Kokomo Blues to Sweet Home Chicago

On the Kokomo Blues Page you can read an extensive story about the origins of Sweet Home Chicago.

Back in time with the Boll Weevil Song

Shocking Blue – Boll Weevil (1969)

Shirley Collins and Davy Graham – Boll Weevil, Holler (1965)

The Weavers – The Boll Weevil (1955)

Leadbelly – Boll Weevil (1934)

Jaybird Coleman – Boll Weevil Blues (1927)

Origin of Venus (Shocking Blue)

The Big Three (Tim Rose, Jim Hendricks, Cass Elliot) – The Banjo Song (1963)

Al Jolson Black and White Minstrels (1939) – Oh! Suzanna

Stephen Foster. The song was so popular that the publishing firm Firth, Pond & Company offered him a royalty rate of two cents per copy of sheet music sold, convincing him to become the first fully professional songwriter in the United States.

Venus vs Banjo Song

Robbie van Leeuwen's orchestration and lyrics turned Tim Rose's folk song into a world hit. Rose never claimed rights. For  'The Banjo Song' he used the traditional song Oh! Suzanna (Stephen Foster, 1848). At that time it was common for melodies to be 'borrowed' for new songs. Rose's musical arrangement was new and Van Leeuwen definitely could have included this in the credits.