浜村美智子, "バナナボート" (Hamamura Michiko, "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)")
A bilingual cover of the Harry Belafonte classic. A Japanese woman singing in English, covering a Jamaican calypso song, is quite a cross-cultural leap.
And, of course, no mention of this song can go without the Beetlejuice version:
Dick Cavitt, one of the hippest TV personalities to invite musicians to perform on his program (The Smothers Brothers were the kings), scheduled his program for Monday night, August 18, 1969, to highlight performers at the nearby Woodstock Music & Arts Festival; his studio was in New York City. The plan originally was to have Jimi Hendrix on, but he didn’t finish playing until well into Monday morning as was reportedly a bit spaced out.
So Cavitt put together a program featuring Jefferson Airplane and Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Stephen Stills