More Covers

Since I ended the last post with a famous Chinese song recorded by a Japanese pretending to be Chinese, it's probably appropriate to open this post with a Chinese singer recording the same song .... in Japanese (and Chinese):



This is Yamagushi Yoshiko's Japanese version of the song from a 1958 Japanese film:



As I mentioned in the last post, this is a Chinese standard covered by many artists.

I'm not a huge fan of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君), the first singer above, but she is revered by many Chinese signers. I much prefer Tsai Chin's (蔡琴) Chinese version:



Teng and Tsai Chin both sing with slight Taiwanese accents, this is Zhang Yan's (张燕)version with a Beijing accent. You only need to listen to a few bars of her version and Tsai Chin's to get a feel for their different handling of Mandarin:



Tsai Chin recorded what is probably my favorite Christian rock song, mostly because neither I nor several Chinese people I know realized it was a Christian song until it was pointed out to us, and those, I would submit, are the only kind of Christian pop songs worth listening to (otherwise, crack open a hymnal):



Finally something I just stumbled across. While I'm not a great fan of Yamaguchi Yoshiko's 1930s somewhat nasal singing style (preferring the jazzier sounds of her 1940s recoding such as Tokyo Serenade) How can you not link to a song called "Please Stop Smoking Opium My Darling"?