▶︎ Teresa Brewer's quirky Aussie trifecta

Singing star of the 50s
Teresa Brewer's voice was familiar on radio and records throughout the 1950s. From 1950 to 1957 she made the Top 40 twenty-five times, beginning with Music, Music, Music, (1950, #1 USA) also known for its familiar opening words Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon. 

Some of her songs, like Ricochet (1953, #2 USA), were in that perky post-WW2, pre-rock'n'roll vein of Music, Music, Music, but that did not confine her. A Tear Fell (1956 #5 USA) was on the pop charts while Ivory Joe Hunter's version was charting #15 R&B, and her cover of Sam Cooke's current hit You Send Me charted #8 USA for her in 1957. 

In the following years she proved her versatility by recording albums with jazz greats including Count Basie (The Songs Of Bessie Smith), Stephane Grappelli and Duke Ellington. On the 1973 album In London she recorded contemporary songs with Oily Rags, a younger band featuring Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock, soon to be stars as Chas And Dave.

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Teresa's versions of Australian hits
Teresa Brewer clearly cast widely for material. Her cover versions even included three songs previously released by Australasian artists, songs that would have been familiar mainly to Australians. 

There were Teresa Brewer versions of:

• Col Joye's Bye Bye Baby (1959, #1 Sydney #3 Melbourne #2 Brisbane #2 Adelaide #2 Perth; #3 Australia).
Covered on 1959 single using the alternative title Bye Bye Baby Goodbye.

• Patsy Ann Noble's Good Looking Boy (1961, #16 Sydney #6 Melbourne #13 Brisbane #8 Adelaide; #17 Australia).
Covered on 1961 single, song retitled Pretty Lookin’ Boy.

• Maria Dallas's Ambush (1967, #19 Sydney #12 Melbourne #4 Brisbane; #16 Australia).
Covered on album Unliberated Woman (1975)

All three of those songs had chart success only in Australia.

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Okay, some qualifications 
There seems to be no special connection between Teresa Brewer and Australia. 

If you look more closely, the American elements found amongst the three Australian-charting records might help to explain why they came to the attention of Teresa and her people.

• Bye Bye Baby and Good Looking Boy were recorded by Australians
• Ambush was by a New Zealander. Maria Dallas's single did not chart in NZ, but she was a star, and many NZers would have known the song which was also on her albums Maria Dallas In Nashville (1967) and Tumblin’ Down (1968).

• Bye Bye Baby and Ambush are American compositions
• Good Looking Boy was written by a New Zealander residing in Australia, Johnny Devlin

• Good Looking Boy and Ambush were original versions
• Bye Bye Baby by Col Joye was itself a cover, the only charting version of a lesser-known American original recorded by Sonny Williams

• Bye Bye Baby and Good Looking Boy were recorded in Sydney
• Ambush was recorded in Nashville.

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Further reading, back at the website
• Song histories of Bye Bye Baby, (aka Bye Bye Baby Goodbye), Good Looking Boy and Ambush
• The Obscure Originators feature has articles about Sonny Williams who originally released Bye Bye Baby and about Bobby & Dude, the sisters from Texas who wrote Ambush. 

Chart sources
Retrospectively compiled Australasian charts by Warwick Freeman (NZ), Dean Scapolo (NZ), Gavin Ryan (Australian capital cities) and Grant Dawe (national Australia). US charts by Joel Whitburn: 1940-1955, 1955-2012 (via Internet Archive).

 
↑ Music, Music, Music (1950, #1), the first of many charting Teresa Brewer singles

↑ Known in Australia as a Col Joye song, this went back even further than that

↑ Good Looking Boy retitled Pretty Lookin’ Boy for Teresa's version

 ↑ Teresa covers an Australian hit for a NZ singer who recorded it in Nashville


↑ Teresa Brewer does Van Morrison with Oily Rag (1973)

▶︎ Cover version or remake?

Some online music forums used to insist on making a distinction between a cover version and a remake of a record. 

This was back in, say, the late 1990s to early 2000s, when Usenet newsgroups such as rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1950s were thriving.

Cover?
In this strict terminology, a cover version is released around the time of the original in order to take advantage of the song's current or potential popularity. Several versions of a song could be selling well at the same time. This often happened in the pre-1960s era, but there are plenty of later examples. (In the 60s it wasn't unusual to hear covers of tracks from the latest Beatles album.) 

Judy Stone's version of Born A Woman (June 1966) came out soon after the original by Sandy Posey (May 1966), qualifying it as a true cover version. In Australia Sandy and Judy co-charted in some surveys. 

The same goes for Johnny Farnham's cover of Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head (December 1969), originally by B.J. Thomas (October 1969). Again, these two records appeared side-by-side on some Australian radio charts.

Remake?
On the other hand, in some discussions, if you called Billy Thorpe's version of Poison Ivy (1964) a cover of The Coasters' original (1959) someone would quickly point out your gaffe. No, no, no, after 5 years, Billy's version was a remake. It was easier to stick to the convention.

Cover!
Nowadays, though, cover is so widely accepted to mean any later version that the remake distinction would be lost on most readers. The big song history sites The Originals, SecondHandSongs and (obviously) Cover.info all use cover to mean any later version, and these are run by experts in the field.

A clincher for me was when I realised that cover was already used by songwriters to mean any recording of their published song. I first noticed it in an email from an American songwriter who said one of his songs got a lot of covers. From a songwriter, this indicates that a song was successful, that it did some good business, regardless of when it was recorded.

James Taylor covers some old songs in 2008

▶︎ Obscure Originators (36): Willie Harper

From my website's front page series about lesser known artists who performed the original versions of Australian or NZ records.

See also: the full collection of over 30 Obscure Originators features. 

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Australian pop star Ray Brown released his version of New Kind Of Love in February 1967, the B-side of a double-sided hit with The Same Old Song (#12 Australia).

The original version of New Kind Of Love (1962) was one of several singles recorded by Willie Harper for the Alon and Sansu labels, both co-owned by Allen Toussaint, the major New Orleans producer, songwriter, arranger, singer and pianist. 

The consensus is that Willie Harper should have been better known. It's safe to say that more people have heard his voice than would know his name.

He was a constant presence in the background of Allen Toussaint's studio productions, and his own releases were typically written, produced or arranged by Toussaint. A Willie And Allen single from 1967 is by Harper and Toussaint.

Right at the start of Ernie K-Doe's recording of Toussaint's composition Mother-In-Law (1961 #1 USA, #8 Australia), you hear a deep voice repeating the single word Mother-in-law. That's Benny Spellman, but the voice that echoes him, there and throughout the song, is Willie Harper.

Breaking out in Chicago: Billboard 6 Jan 61

The composer of New Kind Of Love is Earl King, another multi-skilled New Orleans musician. Although the recording is admired by R&B and soul fans, it had only localised success at the time.

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For more about the song and Willie Harper, see Ray Brown - New Kind Of Love.