Has anybody been innocently listening to a band or an album for the first time, and lo and behold, a song that isn't a cover plays that you've heard before. I think it's a profound listening experience when that happens, especially if the cover is pretty darn good too. Thanks to my reading of liner notes and other information I dig up, I rarely am completely surprised when I hear the original artist.

I had the purest form of this experience only yesterday when I was catching up with albums for our assigned year this month, 1983. I was listening to Violent Femmes' debut on Rhapsody.com (no liner notes to read through there) and Gone Daddy Gone came on as the second to last track! Being used to the slick sly version from Gnarls Barkeley, this was exciting to hear the driving groove smooth out and propel the scrappy unstable energy that the Femmes reflected through the rest of the songs on this very good record.

Now to any fans that love the original artists and songs, this thread might be sacrilege, but we all have different filters in which we take in music, and even though I knew close to 4 songs from the Violent Femmes s/t I didn't know this song was on there, and it was fun to discover.

So this thread for anyone else who has had this musical listening experience. Confess, all you self-claimed music junkies! What 'originals' have you discovered?

(P.S. It looks like Gone Daddy Gone incorporated elements of Willie Dixon's I Just Want to Make Love to You, according to Wikipedia. But I'm saying I still discovered an original)

Hey, I had almost the exact same experience as you, but it was a while back.

"I Fought The Law" by Bobby Fuller Four is the most recent example I can think of. The Clash ruined that song. I love it!

(As for "the exact same experience," I mean the exact same experience with "Gone Daddy Gone".)

I don't have any vivid recollection of the very first time I heard Marley sing "I shot the Sheriff", and I may have had the truth told to me in advance, but there used to be a time, when I thought the song was written by Clapton