Blog 31

For my second CD review I decided instead of doing a whole album to compare the same song sung by two different artists like we did in class with “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley and also Big Mama Thorton’s version. The song I chose to do was “Hang on Sloopy” by the McCoys and “My Sloopy Girl by The Vibrations.  I picked this song to analyze because when it was mentioned in class it caught my attention and I wanted to hear the other version.

            The first thing that caught my attention is that normally I like the originals in class. The ‘black’ version has more soul and improvisation and I’m normally a fan of that style of singing. But in this case I liked the white version better and that surprised me. I almost felt as if The Vibrations voices didn’t fit the song as well. And maybe that is just due to the fact that I’m so used to hearing The McCoys version and that’s why I like it better. I couldn’t tell for sure but for some reason the improvisation in the song just didn’t work for me in The Vibrations version. The one thing that I did like better about their version was where they added in a “baby” or “ooweee” and they yelled it in a higher pitch.

            The other thing that I noticed about this cover was that the McCoys didn’t really change much about the song. When we listened to “Hound Dog” the two versions were drastically different and most of the lyrics that Big Mama Thorton had used weren’t present in Elvis’s song.  We learned that this was because of the sexual connotation wasn’t appropriate for the public at that time. I thought that both versions of “Hang on Sloopy” I listened to had very sexual lyrics and that surprised me because I expected the ‘white’ version to be toned down just as Hound Dog was. Some examples of the sexual innuendos put into the song are:

 Sloopy let your hair down, ooo
Let it hang down on me
Sloopy let your hair down, girl
Let it hang down on me, yeah

And:

Well it feels so good (come on, come on)
you know it feels so good (come on, come on)
well shake it, shake it, shake it sloopy (come on, come on)
shake it, shake it, shake it yeah (come on, come on)

I didn’t know how to take that the songs were very similar. It might have been a good thing that they didn’t change to much of what The Vibrations did but at the same time then they were stealing it straight from them instead of at least trying to make it their own like the other white artists did. I still am not sure how to feel about the topic but I have to say that I never knew there was such controversy behind a song that all of us Buckeyes hold so dear.