Male singers performing songs written from a female viewpoint

HAL9000

This came up in discussion as we’re thinkin of adding Hound Dog to our set list. Obviously the Big Mama Thornton and the Elvis cover are the two definitive versions. We all prefer the BMT lyrics but they are so much sung from the woman’s point of view about a philandering husband or boyfriend. The lyrics were written expressly for BMT by Lieber and Stoller. In comparison the Elvis lyrics are somewhat sanatiised presumably to remove sone innuendo and make things more acceptable to a white American audience. We will probably end up either doing the BMT version or taking bits from each. Just wondering how others bands that don’t have a female vocalist feel about this kind of thing.

bloodandtears

we have the reverse...  we have to employ some clever wordplay occasionally but mostly it's easy to swap words like boy/girl or he/she

trickier when a name is used..  e.g. in DLR's Just LIke Paradise..   Suzie, Suzie became Scooby Doo..

.. and some songs are probably just no go's... I'd like to do DLR's Yankee Rose but like many of his tunes it's littered with female references..

If you can easily switch stuff then so be it.. if it's littered and the core of the song... be objective.

thecolourbox

I've sang female songs and not bothered to change it to shoe horn it into sounding like a male point of view song. I view it as being similar to how when I'm performing a song from any other point of view than my own, like say I'm singing "A Boy Named Sue", I've never been a tough guy whose dad left when he was young who goes around bars picking fights and looking for his dad, but I don't try to change the words to be my situation, I just do the song.

When I used to play solo stuff public I used to perform Bang Bang You Shot Me Down, which is a female perspective song, with a verse of Riders on the Storm in the middle as a mashup which is more male point of view. People liked it, nobody ever said "that's weird that you were singing about a man"

merlin

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/a4zc8r/jolene_at_33_rpm/

axisus

In this day and age it seems OK for a man to sing about a man. Release your inner gay for 5 minutes, before ushering him hastily back into the closet.

roberty

Or you could just go all out

EricTheWeary

Our singer would have a veto on anything due to lyrics. In our case more likely to have been not wanting to venture into anything with too much Jamaican slang. Whilst we did songs where the original singer was female quite often they weren’t really doable in terms of pitch, key, whatever without having to change everything so it wasn’t much of an issue. 

RocknRollDave

EricTheWeary said:

Our singer would have a veto on anything due to lyrics. In our case more likely to have been not wanting to venture into anything with too much Jamaican slang. Whilst we did songs where the original singer was female quite often they weren’t really doable in terms of pitch, key, whatever without having to change everything so it wasn’t much of an issue. 

This. I suppose I swap “him” for “her” in I Love Rock n Roll, but generally, I’m not too fussed about changing lyrics, seeing as I can be fairly sure nobody is paying attention to them anyway (I do often change lyrics for my own amusement, again nobody notices.) 
But, like Eric says, sometimes it’s just a case of not being able to sing the song at all, in any key that isn’t dropped to the point of making it sound awful. 

Blueingreen

I'd probably side-step the problem by doing Shake Rattle'n'Roll or Rock Around The Clock instead - equally good songs very much in the same vein.  The first one has you covered for suggestive lyrics.  Won't work if you're specialising in that style of music and need a couple of sets worth of course.

Snags

Unless you have a particularly uptight audience, or a singer who wasn't comfortable with themselves, I wouldn't let it bother me.

The modern world is (generally) considerably less hung-up about same-sex stuff, plus if it's a cover of a well-known song then most people who are listening will know what the original lyrics are anyway. For those who aren't listening and are just "experiencing", it doesn't matter.

I've sung Jolene (in a very low register, not quite Sisters low, but low), and frequently do "Follow your arrow" by Kacey Musgraves (chorus: So make lots of noise/and kiss lots of boys/or kiss lots of girls/if that's something you're into). Admittedly I sometimes introduce the latter saying it's originally sung by an attractive woman, not a fugly bloke, but more for the self-deprecation than anything.

Oh, and @RocknRollDave - you know that it's "her" in the original, right? Joan Jett's is a cover, that she swapped to make it fit the genders Although I Love Rock'n'Roll is one of those songs that always feels slightly uncomfortable to sing as a middle-aged bloke about a young woman ...

thecolourbox

Maybe you should change it to "I love @RocknRollDave " instead

Keefy

I've been known to sing Stand By Your Man. It works as a request to women to put up with the faults so often displayed by us men, no need to change any words.

EricTheWeary

Keefy said:

I've been known to sing Stand By Your Man. It works as a request to women to put up with the faults so often displayed by us men, no need to change any words.

Keefy

EricTheWeary said:

Keefy said:

I've been known to sing Stand By Your Man. It works as a request to women to put up with the faults so often displayed by us men, no need to change any words.

I take my inspiration from the Tammy Wynette arrangement. That version must have escaped my attention…

Caffeine_Vampire

Unless you're playing in Hicksville, South Texas I wouldn't worry about it.  You're a storyteller not a drag queen.

maltingsaudio

Keefy said:

EricTheWeary said:

Keefy said:

I've been known to sing Stand By Your Man. It works as a request to women to put up with the faults so often displayed by us men, no need to change any words.

I take my inspiration from the Tammy Wynette arrangement. That version must have escaped my attention…

Lyle Lovett nails it from a man’s point of view here’s them both doing it and discussing it after
https://youtu.be/ZzOrNq6jL0w


However the definitive version is sung by Minnie Driver in Golden Eye!

p90fool

Sometimes changing the gender of the singer can add a great twist to a song, like when Will Young sang Don't Cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me.