A small excerpt from the link Stewie provided:

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The substantive focus of my talk today is a song, the venerable Corrine Corrina. First recorded in 1928 by the Mississippi-born guitarist and singer Bo Chatmon (a.k.a. Bo Carter), Corrina is a blues, in the well-known 12-bar, AAB-texted form. It is also an 'old-timey' country song, with roots in the southern 'common stock' tradition (Russell 1970:28); and a pop tune, carefully crafted to appeal to a extensive and heterogeneous audience. Chatmon's recording was subsequently 'covered' by musicians working in a great variety of genres and stylistic contexts, including Red Nichols, Art Tatum, Muddy Waters, Albert Ammons, Mississippi John Hurt, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Floyd Cramer, Freddy Fender, Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas Wanderers and the Tennessee Drifters, cajun music pioneer Leo Soileau, Big Joe Turner, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Phil Spector, Bobby Vinton, Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and (my favorite musical trio) Steppenwolf, Lawrence Welk, and George Winston.

My lecture today intercepts the song's complex 70-year trajectory from several angles. In the first part of the talk I locate Bo Chatmon's 1928 recording of Corinne Corinna within a broader musical and social terrain, and attempt to account for the marginal status to which both the song and the musicians who performed it have been relegated in subsequent journalistic and academic writing about American music. In the second half, I present a series of analytical 'snapshots' of subsequent recordings (or 'cover versions') of Corrina, in an attempt to highlight the song's complex and shifting relationship to evolving discourses of racial difference, identity, and commensurability.

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Cruiser