Lake Taupo

Lake Taupo

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Lead Belly/Nirvana - "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

Lead Belly
Legendary blues artist Lead Belly has been influential to many musicians for as long as popular music has been around. This song "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" is a traditional American folk song recorded by many artists and in a variety of styles. However, Lead Belly's version is probably the best remembered and more recently Nirvana took it to a new generation. The song was originally known as 'In The Pines" and also known as "Black Girl" but seems to have settled as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night".



Nirvana
Kurt Cobain played guitar on a version of this song recorded by Mark Lanegan in 1990 and performed it with Nirvana many times after that... the most famous of those performances was for the MTV Unplugged in New York series in 1993. Kurt Cobain had first heard the 1944 recording by Lead Belly and kept the Nirvana versions true to that. That complete unplugged performance was amazing and Kurt Cobain even managed to make cardigans cool again.

No comments:

Post a Comment