This post is not about one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs as the title might suggest.

However, Springsteen is an example of what this blog discusses:

I was let into a Facebook group, Cover Me Baby, which features, as you can guess, cover songs — songs recorded by an act different from the first act that performed the song.

Readers of my Presty the DJ blogs know that I posted covers on occasion.

The irony of the first cover here is that the Pointer Sisters and other artists recorded Springsteen songs while Springsteen was in a dispute with his first manager that kept him out of recording two years after “Born to Run” was released.

One of the more famous — or infamous, depending on your perspective — early cover artists was Pat Boone, who recorded songs first recorded by black artists:

But Boone wasn’t the only one to do that:

In fact, nearly every rock band sings, and often records, cover songs until they generate enough of their own material. Or they record someone’s song they like.

There are some songs that are so old that no one really knows the original artist …

… and some songs you probably never realized were recorded more than once (which might make you ask why they were recorded more than once):

Linda Ronstadt has made an entire career of cover songs, in her pop and her Big Band iterations:

More often than not, the covering artist is best advised to do something different from the original …

… although that’s not easy if you’re covering, well, yourself:

More often than not, but not always, the covered song is not as good as the original.

And there is the rare instance of taking two different songs of the same title …

… and putting them together:

This is a topic that could go on indefinitely, choking bandwidth until the Internet grinds to a stop.