Greatest Rock Cover of All Time?
Amy Shafer Gets Me Listening to Summertime Again
“It’s basically a brand new piece of music. It is no longer, it is no longer George Gershwin. This is Janis Joplin, and whoever’s playing along with her. This is a complete – everything about it is so much their own… you could say maybe it was inspired by or drawn from, but you could never say that Gershwin wrote this… Janis Joplin and her band has borrowed from Gershwin, they’ve borrowed from Bach, and who knows where else they borrowed from, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, who knows? And created something out of those bits of borrowing and inspiration that stands on its own two feet, in its own right, owns its own words. It is not a remake… this is a completely new piece of music and – I guess I love it.”
-Amy Shafer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0V2kTuT9s, around 40:00 in video.
While wandering in Youtube I came across Amy Shafer’s Virgin Rock channel featuring videos in which she, a classical musician and music teacher, encounters rock classics for the first time. When I saw that a recent piece was Janis Joplin (with Big Brother and the Holding Company) doing Summertime, I couldn’t resist. Forty minutes later, it’s leaving me wanting to say more.
I’ve always wondered whether the baroque-sounding guitar is lifted from a specific piece of classical music, the way the Doors’ Spanish Caravan uses Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. Shafer grapples with the same question. She hears a similarity to Bach’s Prelude in C Minor: “maybe that was part of the inspiration, maybe there’s more…”
Shafer hears a sound picture of barefoot kids playing in a back country farm, but I have a different take on the Janis/Big Brother’s version of the song.
Before I get into that, it’s worth mentioning the history of the song. It comes from the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, a story set in the Black community of Charleston, South Carolina. The opera is by three White guys, brothers George and Ira Gershwin, who grew up in Jewish immigrant families in the tenements of New York City, and DuBose Hayward, who came from Charleston and was a descendant of South Carolina’s planter elite. Big Brother and the Holding Company was a psychedelic rock band in San Francisco consisting of guitarists Sam Andrew and James Gurley, bassist Peter Albin, and drummer David Getz. Texas-born folk and blues singer Janis Joplin joined the band as its vocalist in 1966. Many musical streams flowed together to give birth to their version of the song.
Three Strands to Summertime’s Power
To me, you can’t separate the meaning of the song from the pain in Janis’ voice as she sings it. Actually that’s probably true of all her songs. The essence of Janice’s singing, her harsh, coarse, quavering singing, is the suffering that powers it and sanctifies it and draws it out of the depths of her lungs. And you can’t separate the quality of Janis’ voice – “tears like jagged glass at a bonfire on the beach” [-Kim Cronin Meltzer] – from the other elements of the song.
Summertime reverses two formulas that have created many powerful rock classics over the years. One formula is to pair lyrics of depression or even despair with upbeat melodies. The Who, Pink Floyd, and Garbage are some masters of this technique. In contrast, Summertime combines pleasant lyrics with sad music in a minor key. Listen to Janis slowly wailing the song, and ask yourself, “Is this a woman for whom the living’s easy, the fish are jumping, and the cotton is high?”
Since the day that rock and roll discovered the sound of distorted and overamplified guitars, there have been many songs with relatively smooth singing over harsh guitars and many with harsh singing over harsh guitars, but it’s the rare rock song that pairs an instrumental line as pure and sweet as the one in Summertime with a voice as desperate and rugged as Joplin’s. Listening to the song’s opening instrumental notes is like watching a time-lapse of vines growing in a garden, the kind of idyllic scene that goes with the lyrics but is contradicted by the singing.
The contrast between her voice and the guitars’ voices evolves over the song. The instrumental break after the 2nd verse becomes increasingly aggressive, as if the singer’s agitation is seeping into the instruments, until a very distorted guitar solo bursts out of the dialogue of the other guitar voices. But to my ears the new guitar does not sound sad the way the vocal does. It is defiant instead. It builds quickly and then abruptly disappears, replaced by quiet arpeggios that bring us to the third verse.
Culmination
The lyrics in Joplin’s version are pretty much the same as the original, but she brings out their emotional ambiguity. Sure, if this is a lullaby and the children being sung to are going to bed, it is sensible and pleasant to tell them that they will “rise up singing”. But why promise that this will be “One of these mornings,” as if it’s going to happen sometime in the indefinite future? Iin other words, maybe never. “You’re gonna spread your wings… take to the sky” similarly implies a great future reward – after death? – to make up for all the suffering until then. And though the singer tells them “nothing’s going to harm you now,” it’s followed by many, many “No, no, no”’s (far more than in the original, as Shafer points out), which again make the reassurance less than reassuring.
And yet the song is reassuring. When it ends, “Don’t you cry,” Janis stretches out the last word so that the “cryyyyyyyy” softens into an “ahhh”, a kind of acceptance. In the end, I think Janis and Big Brother have taken a great song and transformed it into a transcendent one. In four minutes of music, their Summertime sums up the nature of human existence, achingly beautiful, beautifully painful, and eternally hopeful.