I respect your opinion Jed, but I don't see Natalie Cole's version as a gift -- I could see her singing along in the privacy of her own room, but it is really ghoulish to do this to your own dead father and sell records doing it. We cannot know if he would have approved or not -- given his impeccable taste, I suspect he would have been conflicted -- but at least he would have been around.

The comparison with art is complicated: people have been using reproductions of art and playing with it for a long time, but the human voice is a different category: it is only partially an artefact (a work of art) -- it is (to become spiritual for a second) a more intimate form of thievery simply because of recording: you are not stealing the final work of art, you are stealing something of the person because the voice embodies the interpretation as it happens. Sticking Fred Astaire into a vaccum cleaner commercial was another violation.

just old fashioned I guess.

yours, Peter T.