where did you sleep/spin last night?

Nirvana, "Where did you sleep last night":



Fred Neil, "Merry-Go-Round":



Leadbelly, "Where did you sleep last night":

from Plato's Phaedrus

"But it is worth while adducing this point: that among the ancients, too, those who gave things their names did not regard madness as shameful or a matter for reproach; for otherwise they would not have connected this very word with the finest of the sciences, that by which the future is judged, and named it the "manic" art. No, they gave it this name thinking madness is a fine thing when it comes by divine dispensation; whereas people now crudely throw in the extra "t" and call it "mantic". So too when the ancients gave a name to the investigation sane men make into the future by means of birds and the other signs they use, they call it "oionoistic", because its proponents in a rational way provide insight (nous) and information (historia) for human thinking (oiêsis); while moderns now call it "oiônistic", making it more high-sounding with the long "o". So the ancients testify that god-sent madness is a finer thing than man-made sanity, by the very degree that mantic is a more perfect and valuable thing than oionistic, both when name is measured against name and when effect is measured against effect. But again, in the case of the great maladies and sufferings that occur in certain families from some ancient causes of divine anger, madness comes about in them and acts as interpreter, finding the necessary means of relief by recourse to prayers and forms of service to the gods; as a result of which it hits upon secret rites of purification and puts the man who is touched by it out of danger for both the present and the future, so finding a release from his present evils for the one who is rightly maddened and possessed. A third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses: taking a soft, virgin soul and arousing it to a Bacchic frenzy of expression in lyric and other forms of poetry, it educated succeeding generations by glorifying myriad deeds of those past; while the man who arrives at the doors of poetry without madness from the Muses, convinced that after all expertise will make him a good poet, both he and his poetry--the poetry of the sane--are eclipsed by that of the mad, remaining imperfect and unfulfilled."

(excerpt from Socrates' second speech to Phaedrus)