Songs from the folks tradition are by definition covers, since there obviously is no original recording. One of my favorites is All Around My Hat. It was a hit for Steeleye Span in the 70s:
Later, Status Quo covered Steeleye’s version, with Steeleye lead singer Maddy Prior on harmony vocals:
The thing about folks music is that there’s never one version of a song. Sometimes, two songs get combined into one – think Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme)”. Steeleye Span’s version of “All Around My Hat” combined it with another song called “Tri-Colored Ribbon”. Here’s The Wolfe Tones with a version of the latter, which was done as a political song:
I have two versions of “All Around My Hat”, both by bands that don’t exist any more, neither of which have any YouTube presence. My absolute favorite version is by The Mollys, which was a Celtic/Tejano fusion band out of Arizona. They took this song and put a modern, feminist twist on it. I’ve uploaded it to my SoundCloud account if you want to give it a listen:
Here’s the Amazon link to buy a copy of the CD that came from. Enjoy!
I’m pretty fond of the syncopated, funkified New Orleans version by The Poor Clares, it’s Betsy and Beth singing over percussion and bass (or perhaps bozouki).
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/all-around-my-hat/id391570924?i=391570971