Ten Songs You May Not Know Were Covered: Crazy Little Thing Called Love (#9)

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I've done a couple of series of discussions looking at hits that you may not have known were actually covers. This time around I'm looking at songs you may not have known were covered....for some reason or another. Some of these covers are great, and some of them just make you shake your head. #9: Crazy Little Thing Called Love In the case of this song, I think I'll opt for the latter and shake my head. Queen was one of the great, legendary bands in rock and roll history. Unlike the current crop of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (did you see that joke of a list released yesterday? Oy!), there's no question about the status of Queen in the history of rock and roll. You'd have to be pretty "crazy" to try to rock out on a cover of one of their hits. Meanwhile, over in eastern Kentucky, a skinny guy named Dwight Yoakam was learning "readin', writin', Route 23" (as he sang in a song) before becoming one of the stars in the "neotraditionalist" movement of the mid-1980s country music scene (along with people like Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Randy Travis, and George Strait). His debut album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Etc. was heralded as one of the best country albums of the year. And Billboard magazine had one of the greatest lines ever about him: "If blue jeans had a religion, Dwight Yoakam would be their god." So take the British rock legends and hand one of their iconic songs, the 1980 #1 hit "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," to a neotraditionalist like Dwight Yoakam and what do you get? Can you say, "awkward"? I really enjoy Dwight Yoakam (and you should hear "Heartache Spoken Here," the Warren Zevon country song that Yoakam sang harmony on), but some of his choices of cover songs have really be head-scratchers. It's not the he can't do a rock song well (he did a cover of "Carmelita," one of Zevon's best-known songs)...but this one just doesn't fit him. Crazy Little Thing Called Love Written by Freddie Mercury Originally recorded by Queen, 1979 Covered by Dwight Yoakam, 1999 I don't know, you might like it: