Although an increasing number of scholars in the fields of musicology and popular music studies have recognized and underlined the omnipresence of cover songs in today’s music industry (Cusic, 2006; Mosser, 2008; Plasketes, 1995, 2005, 2016; Weinstein, 2016), accounts of how language use may differ in such re-imagined musical output have been largely absent in the sociolinguistic literature on language and music. Of course, covers and their potential differences from ‘original’ recordings have certainly been acknowledged in passing (see, for example, Beal, 2009; Bell, 2011; Coupland 2009, 2011; Simpson, 1999; etc.), but very few sociolinguists concerned with the study of song seem to have systematically explored this important dimension of contemporary musical practice. This paper aims to address this lacuna by examining the language use in original and cover songs performed by 45 artists from three distinct time periods (viz. 1960s, 1980s and 2010s) and three specific social groups (viz. African American, non-African American US-based, and non-African American non-US based). Through a mixed effects logistic regression analysis of a corpus of 540 blues songs, this study aims to show the similarities and differences in these artists’ use of ten phonological and lexicogrammatical features of African American English across both performative contexts. By building on previous research which has shown how contemporary blues performers use features of African American English in their live performed lyrics, regardless of their own sociocultural background (De Timmerman et al., 2023), the present paper hence aims to (i) further tease out the complex relationship between features of African American English and the blues genre, and (ii) argue for the importance of treating covers as separate performative modes in the sociolinguistics of music.