Strange Criteria

I was reading about the Clique the other day.  You may not know the Clique - they were an also-ran pop group in the late sixties, a time when even first rate pop bands (the Zombies) could sink with little trace.  Their biggest hit was pretty minor, a cover of the Tommy James and the Shondells song "Sugar on Sunday."  It's not bad, and spent some time on the billboard chart.  No one would care about them today, except that the B-side to "Sugar on Sunday" was an original by the band, a jangly pop song called "Superman" which was turned into a classic by REM twenty years later.

Stay with me now.


Harry Nilson's most famous song is arguably "Without You," ("I can't live, if living is" etc.)which was a forgettable Badfinger song and which he completely transformed.  However, Nilson was also a terrific songwriter - the best song he wrote is unarguably "One" ("...is the loneliest number") which we all know through the Three Dog Night version.

So, here's two bands/artists/whatever who have the distinction of a) having their biggest hit as a performer be a cover, and b) having their biggest hit as a songwriter more famous as someone else's song.

Who else is in this position?  It's not hard to think of musicians whose biggest hits they didn't write (Joe Cocker, Aretha Franklin) and it's not hard to think of songwriters who had careers of their own, but whose songs were covered to greater effect by other performers (Willie Nelson, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton).  But it takes a very specific kind of artist.

At first I thought someone like Willie Nelson would fit: very few associate his song "Crazy" with him, rather than Patsy Cline, and "Always on My Mind" was originally written for Brenda Lee.  But Willie's had a long career with a lot of hit songs - it's hard to say that "Always on My Mind" is his biggest song - surely "On the Road Again" is the proto-typical Willie Nelson song.

These problems plague any candidate that springs to mind quickly - if you think of them, they probably had a long career with many hits, and most long-established artists are primarily songwriters (Bob Dylan) or interpreters (Elvis).  Other additions to this category of two will likely come from artists on the periphery; two-hit wonders, maybe.