Lockdown Legends (Day 16): Cover Creations

How many times have we thought that a particular song would have been better in some other singer's voice or in the voice of our favourite singer? I am sure such thoughts must have crossed every music lover.

HMV also thought of this , way back in the 50s. As we all acknowledge, the Fifties was the Golden Period of Hindi film music. The film industry was having top class composers and wordsmiths and an array of high quality singers such as Lata Mangeshkar, Geeta Dutt,  Talat Mehmood, Hemant Kumar, Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh, Manna Dey, Mukesh, Asha Bhonsle and Kishore Kumar.

In the the West, version recordings (where one hit English song was sung by many singers) were quite popular and HMV decided to create a similar movement in India with reard to popular Hindi songs. So , here are three instances of the experiment. It is for the listeners to judge whether it was successful or not.

Since Talat Mahmood was the most popular singer in those days he was persuaded him to do the first recording 'Chal ud ja re panchi' which Mohd Rafi had sung for film 'BHABHI'. The confidence and conviction of Talat in his training and talent was also instrumental in his taking up the project. The result was a beautiful reprisal of an iconic songs. Here are the two songs, the original first and then the cover version. Next up was the Mukesh masterpiece from the film Jaagte Raho. The song pictuised on Motilal , with Raj Kapoor in the frame ,bewildered at the antics of the intoxicated gent, was one of the best songs of Mukesh. Manna Dey, one of the singers who got less than his potential was requested to sing the cover version. The Bengali crooner, accomplished in classical singing, must have found this an easy one, but if you listen to both versions, the original one still tugs at you , a little bit more. Or maybe we are conditioned to listening this song by Mukesh ! The other cover version was of a Hemant Kumar duet with Asha Bhonsle from the film Ek Jhalak ( 1957). The song itself was a sweet romantic song and both Hemant Kumar ( who also the music director ) and Asha sung it very well. Now it is not an easy job to replicate a singer like Hemant Kumar ( who voice was praised by salil Chaudhary by saying that " if god had a voice, it would resemble Hemant Kumar's voice) and it was really a tough job for Mukesh. Listen to the cover version and check out how Mukesh ( singing with J.B.Mesania) creates the magic, in his own sincere manner.

But this idea of singing other singers songs was not going down very well with the singers and they got together to finally decide against going ahead with this idea of HMV and dropped this idea entirely after that. A lost opportunity, in my opinion.