It'll Never Be Over For Me

It happens more often than you might think that a cover version is better than the original. It's not out of the question that someone else giving a song an alternative arrangement and performance could make something in which one finds better things. But unless you were there at the time or are thriving on a later discovery of relatively rare things, you might not be aware of which came first.
It is many years now since I found Timi Yuro's It'll Never Be Over For Me on yet another Northern Soul compilation, it has remained a massive favourite and still is only likely to go further up my chart. But then I subsequently found a version of it on my Baby Washington CD. For some reason, one instinctively assumes that the version one heard first was the original but it isn't necessarily so. And it wasn't until today that I found out that Baby Washington's was the original and Timi Yuro came to it later.
I'm not saying that Timi Yuro was a better singer than Baby Washington, I don't think she was. But her rendering of this song is the best, even given that Baby's is still a fine thing. I just wonder what would have happened if I had discovered them in the right order.
Baby Washington is powerful enough but more relaxed with its Walk on By guitar accompaniment. I did just have to check if it was written by Burt Bacharach but it wasn't. It was Bobrick/Blagman. It also has a sad harmonica, plenty if not plenty enough, but would surely be a classic song in this account if Timi hadn't come along in 1968 to remake Baby's 1964 (it says here) release.
Rather than the gentler orchestration of that, Timi Yuro's cover comes in with the brass section, her muscular, passionate voice and strings giving it all of the abandon of the best Northern Soul masterpieces in which the only motivation seemed to be to dance through the idea of heartbreak in the most audacious and athletic way one could.
I partly regret never having gone to the Wigan Casino and am partly grateful I never did so that my dance floor limitations were never quite so cruelly found out but Stuart Maconie did live in Wigan at exactly the right time and I am grateful for his account of it in the chapter in his book, Cider with Roadies.
It doesn't matter, does it. Having both Timi Yuro and Baby Washington is more than twice as good as having had only one of them. It looks as if this song is 50 years old. I find that Sam Bobrick has a website, that he wrote some of The Girl of My Best Friend, http://www.sambobrick.com/music.php but wasn't really an ongoing commercial success as a songwriter. That is awful but I can sympathize with him on that. On the other hand, I'd still rather have had a hand in a masterpiece than be a millionaire on the back of doggerel.