‘Faith Has Been Broken . . .’

Sometime during the summer of 1971, in the car or hanging out on the front porch or even while cleaning floors at St. Cloud State with Janitor Mike, I must have heard the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” on the radio.

It was on the Billboard Hot 100 for only eight weeks, and it only went to No. 28, yeah, but given that I surrounded myself with music during my non-work and non-sleep hours (and even during work at times as Mike and I waited for floors to dry so we could wax them), I think I had to have heard it. But it must not have made much of an impression, as I recall the first time I played the album Sticky Fingers about a year and a half later, when I got the album through a record club.

“I need to learn to play that on piano,” I recall thinking, listening to the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition as it came out of the speakers in the basement rec room. Hearing the song as part of the album – a hodgepodge of outtakes and finely constructed pieces the Stones had clumped together in the spring of 1971 – was like hearing the song for the first time, I guess. Or maybe I just paid attention to it for the first time.

There was no way that I knew that the song existed elsewhere. But it did. “Wild Horses” had showed up in April 1970 on Burrito Deluxe, the second album by the Flying Burrito Brothers:

Here’s the “Wild Horses” timeline, as pieced together from AllMusic Guide, Second Hand Songs, and Wikipedia.

December 2-4, 1969: Rolling Stones record “Wild Horses.”
December 7, 1969: Keith Richards gives Gram Parsons a demo of “Wild Horses.”
April 1970: Flying Burrito Brothers release “Wild Horses” on Burrito Deluxe.
April 1971: Rolling Stones release “Wild Horses” on Sticky Fingers.

My question, admittedly an inside baseball kind of thing, is: Which recording is the original and which is the first cover? Is the original version of a song the first one recorded or the first one released?

My thought is that the first recorded version is the original and anything else – even if it comes to light ahead of that first recorded version – is a cover.

But to close things out, here’s one of my favorite covers of the song, the version that Leon Russell included on his 1974 album Stop All That Jazz.

Tags: Flying Burrito Brothers, Leon Russell, Rolling Stones