Back before the late ‘50s composers/songwriters were considered a completely separate profession from performers.
The standard was you had composers who wrote songs, and they sold them to performers who then performed and recorded them. So it was very common to have one song performed by many different performers.
That seemed to first really start to change in the late ‘50s with the emergence in popularity of blues and rock & roll where you had people who wrote songs and performed their own songs.
As rock & roll and blues and all of their associated styles exploded in popularity it started to completely change the status quo in the music industry. Why pay songwriters when you can sign a band that writes their own songs? And as popular music began to shift to becoming more rhythm based with very simple melodic and harmonic structures it became less important to have trained composers writing songs - anyone could write a 12 bar blues or 3 chord rock song.
This new status quo of artists who both wrote and performed their own songs meant you had less instances of artists covering other artists songs. It still happened, but far less than in the past.
Today the expectation seems to be that people think performers only perform their own original music. I’ve even seen people get confused thinking that some artists in the ‘50s must have “stolen” another persons song because they both performed it, when the reality was both purchased the performance/recording rights to the same song that a composer/songwriter wrote.
