Clarence Ashley (1929) → Big Brother and the Holding Company (1966)
A fatalistic ballad forged in the isolated ridges of the Appalachian mountains. Clarence Ashley immortalized it in 1929 with eerie sawmill-tuned modal banjo drone, and Harry Smith's 1952 'Anthology of American Folk Music' turned the recording into a sacred cornerstone of the counterculture generation.
Psychedelic Rock / Acid Rock
In 1966 San Francisco's Big Brother and the Holding Company — with Janis Joplin — recorded the song as 'Coo Coo'. Replacing acoustic banjo plucking with blistering fuzz-guitar riffs and thunderous psychedelic drums, they transformed a fatalistic mountain ballad into an explosive anthem of West Coast counterculture acid rock.