You need to listen to three different singers sing one song, I Will Always Love you. The song was written by Dolly Parton and orginally released by her, so it is presented first. The second recording of the song is the you may have heard before: it is sung by Whitney Houston. The third recording, most people are not familiar with. It was recorded by Melissa Ethridge at the request of Dolly Parton. Each recording follows the conventions of different genres of American popular music, so while the lyrics and melody of the song are the same in all three recordings, all three recordings have their own 'flavor.'
Your job is to listen to all three recordings to listen for similarities and differences. You will use your observations and interpretations to wrie a compare and contrast essay about these three recordings of this one song.
Write an analytic essay for a general college audience about these three different recordings of the same song. You can decide what focus your thesis takes -- if you want to claim one recording is better than the others for musical reasons or its ability to reach a specific audience (or the largest audience), if you want to explain why it is good for singers to record other singers's songs, if you want to explain how each recording gives listeners a different feeling or understanding of the lyrics meaning ... or some other focus, the choice is yours. The key is to remember that your essay should not simply describe the versions of the songs; anyone with access to the three recordings can hear the differences (if you know how, you can add a link to, or even embed a copy of, each song in your paper -- or pictures of the artists). If you are not clear about how to focus a compare & contrast essay or how you might structure it, this webpage from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may be useful for you. .
Good luck!
