If you’ve been paying any attention this past year, you wouldn’t have missed Beatles drummer Ringo Starr donning a stately cowboy hat, promoting his new T-Bone Burnett-produced studio album. It’s no secret to Beatles fans that the Fab Four were massive country fans, especially Starr. But today’s country fans might not be aware of just how much the Liverpool quartet’s influence affected the country music canon.
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The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership is one of the most acclaimed of all time. It’s something that has not gone unnoticed by some of the most acclaimed country songwriters of all time. Game recognize game.
Here are some examples of times country’s greatest songwriters paid tribute to The Beatles and understood the assignment (plus one where they didn’t).
Willie Nelson, “Yesterday”
Topping my list is something of a deep cut, albeit from one of country’s most prolific and high-profile performers. Before finally hitting the big time when the outlaw country movement rose to prominence in the 1970s, Willie Nelson struggled to find his place in the industry. Some found his vocal approach too unconventional and jazzy. Most country fans didn’t know what to make of him. Not that he cared.
Willie leaned into unconventional influences from early on in his career, consequences be damned, including this live 1966 cover of what he humorously calls “a pretty fair little country group known as The Beatles.”
“Yesterday” was a relatively new track at a time when most country stars were still reacting negatively, and dare I say fearfully, to the British Invasion (and rock ‘n’ roll in general). Willie’s sparse arrangement and deadpan vocal delivery lend a bleak matter-of-factness and gravity to the originally syrupy Beatles ballad. It proved that Nelson could make country music out of practically any material.
Dolly Parton, “Help”
Dolly Parton is another country star who can turn any material into a country song, including a Beatles track. But this John Lennon-penned hit didn’t need much tweaking to make it into a solid slice of bluegrass-pop that fit right into country radio programming at the time of its release in 1979.
While the Fab Four are not often thought of as country artists themselves, their music shares a lot of roots with American country music, especially, I would argue, bluegrass. Hear me out. Bill Monroe’s addition of blues tonality to traditional Anglo-Scots-Irish folk music chords and song structures created a new sound that formed the basis of most country music to come, including honky-tonk, rockabilly, and rock and roll.
The inclusion of a dominant seventh chord (hear it on the lines “help in any way” and “opened up the door”) was one of Lennon’s favorite songwriting tricks. It’s one that comes straight out of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass playbook. So, it’s no wonder “Help” sounds so natural when worked up in Parton’s signature Appalachian style.
Waylon Jennings, “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away”
Waylon Jennings didn’t spring from the head of Zeus fully-formed—goatee, beer gut, and outlaw attitude intact. The star, in fact, floundered for decades before finding the formula for his success in Nashville.
In the mid-sixties, folk-rock (as popularized by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and The Byrds) was the big thing commercially. And the country music establishment wanted in. In contrast to more convincing efforts from the likes of Merle Haggard and The Gosdin Brothers out west, Nashville attempted to create a folk-rock star out of a hungry young Texan by the name of Waylon Jennings.
Jennings’ album Love Of The Common People positions the future outlaw as a folk-inspired belter, in some ways presaging the earnestness of his final, bearded form, but arguably missing the mark with its schlocky arrangements and heavy-handed “folk” messaging. Jennings’ confident, booming baritone is at odds with the song’s self-deprecating lyrics, and the combination of whitebread Nashville-sound choir and pseudo-psychedelic instrumentation is awkward at best.
It’s no wonder Jennings’ early experiences in Nashville led him to eventually ask, “Are you sure Hank done it this way?”
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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