"L"ots More Songs on my iPod Trivia Quiz

Answer: Long as I Can See the Light

"Though I'm going, going
I'll be coming home soon
Long as I can see the light"

From 1970's "Cosmo's Factory" from Creedence Clearwater Revival. What an album that one was - "Travelin' Band", "Lookin' Out My Back Door", "Run Through the Jungle", "Who'll Stop the Rain", "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"...

Though CCR are possibly the best known purveyors of "swamp rock", a bluesy Southern-flavoured rock style, the band members are all from the San Francisco area. John Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and Stu Cook met in junior high, with Tom Fogerty, John's brother, filling out the lineup.

Answer: Newfoundland and Labrador

This breathtakingly beautiful song about the hard work and danger of traditional Newfoundland fishing life was written in the 1940s by Otto Kelland. Kelland was a member of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, an author, poet and songwriter, and a model shipbuilder. The song is still beloved in Newfoundland, even though the fishery is no more.

The version on my iPod is from The Irish Descendants, and it's lovely. But honestly there is no such thing as an un-beautiful version of this song.

Answer: I live by the river

There's a strong post-apocalyptic vibe to this song from The Clash, and no wonder - the Three Mile Island nuclear error of 1979 had happened earlier that year. Things were looking pretty bleak in Thatcher's Britain, and fairly bleak personally for the band, who were broke and in conflict with the label and with management.

This one comes to us from the songwriting team of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, and led off the eponymous double album. The 2004 Rolling Stone Greatest 500 Songs list has "London Calling" as number 15, which is pretty good for a punk song on that list.

They also rated the album as the best of the '80s.

Answer: Zulu

The song, known at that time by the name "Mbube", was first recorded by Solomon Linda in South Africa in 1939, though he had written it some years earlier. That recording made its way to the US, and in 1951 The Weavers recorded their version, which they called "Wimoweh". George Weiss wrote English lyrics in 1961, and the song got the title "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and that's the version The Tokens recorded.

It took some time for Linda to get the recognition (and royalties) he deserved. Some of this appears to have been innocent (The Weavers were apparently told it was a traditional folk song), but some was considerably more shady - it is apparent that some people, at least, knew the song had a then-living composer. It was not until the early 21st century that the story really came to light, and a settlement was finally reached in 2006 with the Linda estate. Solomon Linda himself died in 1962.

The version I have on my iPod is that from The Tokens.

Answer: The Lady is a Tramp

The lyrics of this one change depending on whether it is being sung by a man or a woman, but also it tends to be get updated or played with lyrically pretty regularly. It's been recorded by everybody you can imagine - Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Bing Crosby to mention just a few. There is a Frank Sinatra version on my iPod - it became something of a signature song for him.

Answer: Freeway

"L.A. Freeway" was pretty much autobiographical for Guy Clark, who had come with his wife Susanna to L.A. to try to make it in the music business. They were very unhappy, and eventually threw it all in to head to Nashville "in a cloud of smoke". As the story goes, he woke up in the car with some of the lyrics in his head, and wrote them down with Susanna's eyeliner on some junk food wrappings off the car floor. From what I've heard of those two, this story sounds extremely likely.

Clark went on to become a friend and mentor to many Nashville singer-songwriters, and a lot of them have covered this song - Jerry Jeff, of course, plus Steve Earle, Radney Foster, Roseanne Cash, Michael Martin Murphy, and others. I've got four versions of it myself, on my iPod.

Answer: Billie Holiday

This 1956 beauty written by Holiday and Herbie Nichols was one of her signature songs - it was the title song of its album, the title of her autobiography from the same year, and the title of the biopic starring Diana Ross in 1972.

It was hard to decide which "L" Billie Holiday song to include in this quiz - I've got "Let's Do It", "Love for Sale", "Love Me or Leave Me", "Lover Man", and "Lover Come Back to Me" on my iPod also.

Answer: Let's Spend the Night Together

"Let's Spend the Night Together" from The Rolling Stones in 1967. It was a double A side with "Ruby Tuesday" but lagged in the charts, probably because of lack of radio play due to the lyrics - for the time, it was considered very sexually suggestive.

They famously had to change the words to "Let's spend some time together" in order to play the song on "Ed Sullivan" in the US, and if you check out that performance, yes, you can see Jagger rolling his eyes.

Answer: Marvin Gaye

Probably the sexiest song of all time, it came out on the album of the same name in the summer of 1973. It was a huge hit, number one on both Pop and R&B charts.

Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" was accused of plagiarism of this song, but I've just spent half an hour on youtube taking a listen, and I can't hear the similarity, myself.

Jack Black does a decent cover in the movie "High Fidelity", but the version on my iPod is the one and only original.

Answer: Long Black Veil

"Long Black Veil" was first recorded by Lefty Frizzell in 1959, though I first heard it on one of my mom's Johnny Cash albums.

In the song, our hero allows himself to be hanged for murder, rather than betray his lady love. After his death, she walks the hills in a long black veil, mourning him. It's got all the elements of a folk ballad, and it's rather surprising, really, that it was written in the 1950s by a couple of Nashville songwriters, Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin.

The Band played it at Woodstock, and I've got their "Music from Big Pink" version on my iPod, along with one from the Grateful Dead.