Twitter Is Clapping Back at a White Dude Getting Credit for Corinne Bailey Rae's "Put Your Records On"

Ian West - PA Images / Contributor, Getty Images

On November 13th, Billboard spotlighted Jack Rutter of the solo act Ritt Momney, whose cover of Corinne Bailey Rae's 2006 hit "Put Your Records On" went viral on TikTok earlier this year. Rutter's version of the song is now the backtrack to over 1.4 million TikTok videos, and has since entered the Billboard Hot 100 list after being released a year prior. But the internet isn't about to let Rae's original song get pushed to the wayside, especially by a recreation by a white man.

"You know the songs that you just have memorized your whole life? It was totally one of those songs for me," Rutter said of "Put Your Records On," and why he chose to cover the track. "My mom really loves that song—around when it came out, she’d play it all the time. It reminded me of writing in the back of my mom’s minivan and a much simpler time. It has always been the epitome of a joyful, hopeful song for me."

Rutter also added that the track is "just such a good song," and covering it pulled him out of a "pretty intense indie kid phase" which caused him to snub pop music.

"But working on that song, I was like, “This is a really well-written song, objectively.” That part of me wanted to remind people about it," he said.

Though his cover has spiked in popularity with over 4.2 million plays on YouTube and nearly 130 million streams on Spotify, Rutter believes his version has reminded listeners how good Rae's original song is.

"Songwriting will always be the main driving force behind how much anybody likes a song," he said when asked why it's important to him that people are going back and listening to the original song from 2006. "I think people give me way too much credit for doing cool production because it’s not the production that gets people dancing to it or makes people really like it. It’s the fact that it’s just a really good song."

Despite giving credit where it is due, the fact that a new version of "Put Your Records On" was re-produced and sung by a white man isn't sitting easy with fans of the OG track.

To some, the way Rutter describes Rae's "Put Your Records On" as a track that was forgotten about until he brought it back into the mainstream reads as erasure—as does radio stations choosing to play his cover over Rae's original.

Having jammed out to, fell in love with, and played Corinne Bailey Rae's "Put Your Records On" on repeat in the early-2000s, most of us don't need a refresher that the song (and the artist) still exists.

If it's any consolation, Rae's music video for her song has been viewed on YouTube over 26 million times since it was posted on the site in 2015, and she has an astounding 300 million streams on Spotify. So, fear not—no one is forgetting about Corinne Bailey Rae and "Put Your Records On," according to these numbers, and hopefully this conversation on Twitter is "reminding" listeners to tune into her old classics and her newer releases like "Green Aphrodisiac," "Stop Where You Are," and eve her own cover of Coldplay's "The Scientist."