"You'll Need Somebody on Your Bond" (later titled "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond") is a gospel song that is attributed to both tradition and to gospel blues musician Blind Willie Johnson. Under the name "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond", the Deviants included this song on their final studio album (or at least the last one released before the death of bandleader Mick Farren), Dr. Crow (2002). (More from Wikipedia)
I was scanning the song list on It's My Way! and spotted another song that came up in a different context: "You're Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond". As with every song on It's My Way! but one, the songwriter was listed as Buffy Sainte-Marie on the Allmusic listing for the album. I actually said out loud when I saw that: "Really?!" – where I remembered it was on the most recent album by the psychedelic hard rock band the Deviants, Dr. Crow.
I don't remember thinking consciously that "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond" – the way the song was shown on the Deviants album – didn't sound like a song that Buffy Sainte-Marie would have written, but it really didn't. For that matter, it didn't sound like a song that the Deviants would have written either. "You're Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond" sounded like an old-time blues number, with a strong-throated black background singer doing a duet with Deviants frontman Mick Farren.
I will have more to say about songwriting in a post sometime in the future, but generally speaking, the music industry has become much more fastidious about songwriting credits now than was the case through the 1960's. Regarding "You're Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond", which is a song that is evidently in the Public Domain, it was fairly common for musicians to list themselves as the songwriters. The more proper credit would be: "Traditional – arranged by Buffy Sainte-Marie".
Songwriting credits were not handled so scrupulously back then anyway, and those practices continued at least through the end of the 1960's. I have already mentioned in previous posts that Buffy Sainte-Marie showed her own name as the songwriter of "You're Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond" on her debut album It's My Way!; and that Deep Purple claimed to be the writer of "Hey Joe" on their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple (the musical bridge before the song was their work, but "Hey Joe" had already been a hit song several times by then).
(February 2015)
