Dave Van Ronk - "Both Sides Now"

After reading Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, Joni Mitchell wrote this song that posits love, like a cloud, as an amorphous, inscrutable thing whose shape is constantly shifting along with our perception of it. It's a song that makes me think of the clouds in Carly Simon's coffee and then of another Mitchell, the novelist David, who writes of "a galaxy of cream unribboning" in his cup. (If I were a reactionary YouTube troll I would complain about the dearth of contemporary Billboard hits inspired by or evocative of great works of fiction, but I dislike those people and anyway I have no reason to believe music was ever more literate on average than it is today, which begs the question: why did I raise this?) When the late NYC folkie Dave Van Ronk first listened to Mitchell's song in 1969 he heard no Carly Simon, no David Mitchell; he heard in it the possibility of something slower and gruffer, warmer and more deeply felt in the singing.

It could be said that there are as many great versions of a song as there are great appreciators. But it's only when a great appreciator is also a great musician that the rest of us get access to one of these versions. The best interpreters of song are both preservationists and stylists; they protect the essence of a piece of music and add to it something of themselves - Ronkness, for instance, in the case of Ronk. The best interpretations, such as Ronk's lovely live rendition of one of his friend's many masterpieces, are those that show us that even when we think we've looked at it from both sides, we still really don't know the song at all. [Buy]

Rufus Cohen and Wade Patterson - "So Long: Go"

And when Rufus Cohen and Wade Patterson listened to West African folk music they heard in it something of the early sound of the American south. [Buy]