In celebration, a deep dive into the origins of the most covered songs by The Beatles
They say it’s his birthday. His 78th birthday! Can it be? Many believed he was secretly dead more than fifty years ago. They were so wrong. Almost to his ninth decade, the man is going strong.
Happy 78th birthday, Beatle Paul. Also known as Sir Paul McCartney, he is revered forever as a songwriter with good reason. Not only did he write, alone and with John Lennon, many of the world’s most beloved, magical and remarkable songs, he expanded the arc of popular song as we know it.
He also has the distinction of writing – alone and also with John – many of the most successful and covered songs of all time. Even in The Beatles, as one half of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team, McCartney was the more popular songwriter (as deemed by industry standards. in that he wrote more songs which became standards – songs recorded by many other artists).
Of the ten most recorded Beatles songs, the first five were all written by McCartney alone. “Yesterday” is at the top of this list, followed by “Hey Jude,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be” and “Michelle,” all of which are essentially McCartney songs, though profoundly tempered by Lennon’s input.
Of the remaining ten, only one – “A Hard Day’s Night” – was written by Lennon alone (completed in one night to a title he knicked from Ringo, and which became the title song of their next album and first movie).
George Harrison wrote one of the top ten alone, “Something,” which Frank Sinatra also recorded and said was his “favorite Lennon & McCartney song.” The others were all co-writes, in that Lennon contributed key parts, although each was started and mostly completed by McCartney.
The origins of a few of these are still in some dispute, as Paul and John famously disagreed on the facts. Let’s have a closer look.
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Top Ten Most Covered Beatles Songs
- Yesterday
- Hey Jude
- Eleanor Rigby
- Michelle
- Let It Be
- A Hard Day’s Night
- I Want To Hold Your Hand
- Something
- She Loves You
- And I Love Her
The first song on the list has the distinction of being the most covered song of all time. “Yesterday.” Its origin story is one of the most famous ones, and a great example of a songwriter discovering a song so great even they can’t fathom it.
It was famously born as pure melody first, back when Paul lived at the Wimpole Street home of the Ashers, the family home of his girlfriend Jane Asher. Fortunately he had a piano in his room, or all might have been lost.
“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” he said. “I thought, That’s great, I wonder what that is? There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor seventh – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to G.”
So distinctive and tuneful was this dream melody that he assumed he’d stolen it from somewhere else. He swiftly used a dummy lyric, which as the world knows started with the words “Scrambled eggs” on what would be the three-syllable title – and went off to find out if it was his own song or not.
Lennon recalled that the dummy lyric and search for proper title was something they did together. His recollection is that it took two dreams, not one, to complete this song.
“Paul wrote nearly all of it,” said John, “but we just couldn’t find the right title. Every time we got together to write songs or for a recording session, this would come up. We called it ‘Scrambled Egg’ and it became a joke between us. We almost had it finished when we made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit and, believe me, we just couldn’t find the right one.
“Then one morning,” John added, “Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there. Completed! I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but it is the plain truth.”
McCartney said he finished the song on his own en route for a holiday with Jane at his friend Bruce Welch’s villa in Portugal. During a dusty 180-mile drive to Albufeira from the airport at Lisbon, while Jane napped, Paul finished his masterpiece.
“Jane was sleeping but I couldn’t,” he said, “and when I’m sitting that long in a car I either manage to get to sleep or my brain starts going. I remember mulling over the tune ‘Yesterday’, and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse.
“I started to develop the idea,” he continued. “‘Scram-ble-d eggs, da-da da’. I knew the syllables had to match the melody, obviously: ‘da-da da’, ‘yes-ter-day’, ‘sud-den-ly’, ‘fun-il-ly’, ‘mer-il-ly’, and ‘yes-ter-day’, that’s good. ‘All my troubles seemed so far away.’ It’s easy to rhyme those ‘a’s: say, nay, today, away, play, stay, there’s a lot of rhymes and those fall in quite easily, so I gradually pieced it together from that journey. ‘Sud-den-ly’, and ‘b’ again, another easy rhyme: e, me, tree, flea, we, and I had the basis of it.”
It has become the world’s most covered song, with over 2000 covers of it presently. In the 20th century alone it is estimated that it has been performed more than two million times.
“I Want To Hold Your Hand,” their first hit in America in 1964, was co-written “nose to nose,” as they used to say, by Lennon and McCartney. Lennon confirmed this in his great Playboy interview with Peter Scheff.
“We wrote a lot of stuff together,” Lennon said, “one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u/ got that something …’ And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s noses.”
McCartney agreed with John’s memory. In 1994 he said, “‘Eyeball to eyeball’ is a very good description of it. That’s exactly how it was. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was very co-written.”
The only other genuine Lennon-McCartney collaboration on the list is “She Loves You,” a 1963 hit in the UK before The Beatles came to America. Paul said that it, like many of their songs, was inspired by another song they liked, this one being Bobby Rydell’s “Forget Him” which has a call and response section.
“As often happens,” he said, “you think of one song when you write another… I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘she loves you’ and the other ones would answer ‘yeah yeah’. But then we decided that was a crummy idea! But at least we then had the idea of a song called ‘She Loves You’. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it, John and I, sitting on twin beds with guitars.”
“And I Love Her,” the tenth most covered Beatles song, is one in which there is some dispute about authorship. Lennon said more than once he wrote the bridge, or “middle-eight” as they called it.
“I’m not sure if John worked on that at all,” said Paul. “The middle eight is mine. I would say that John probably helped with the middle-eight, but he can’t say ‘It’s mine.’ I wrote this on my own.”
According to their publisher, Dick James, John and Paul wrote the bridge together.
“They were laying down the tracks and doing the melody lines of the song ‘And I Love Her,’ said James. “It was a very simple song and quite repetitive. George Martin and I looked at each other and the same thought sparked off in both our minds… George told the boys, ‘Both Dick and I feel that the song is just lacking in the middle. It’s too repetitive and it needs something to break it up.’
“I think it was John who shouted, ‘OK, let’s have a tea break’ and John and Paul went to the piano.. Within half an hour they wrote, there before our very eyes, a very constructive middle to a very commercial song. Although we know it isn’t long, it’s only a four-bar middle, nevertheless it was just the right ingredient to break up the over-repetitive effect of the original melody.”
Paul wrote “Let It Be” during the making of The White Album, inspired by a dream of his mother Mary. (Many assumed this was a reference to the mother of Christ, an idea perpetuated by the holy, churchlike vibe of the song). It was the final single released by The Beatles prior to the announcement of their break-up. McCartney had recorded it with the band several times, including in the film Let It Be, which is a different recording than the single.
“Eleanor Rigby” is another one which most people attribute completely to Paul, although both Ringo and George contributed to it.
“I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it,” said McCartney. “The first few bars just came to me, and I got this name in my head …’Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church.’ I don’t know why. I couldn’t think of much more so I put it away for a day. Then the name ‘Father McCartney’ came to me, but I thought that people would think it was supposed to be about my dad sitting knitting his socks. Dad’s a happy lad. So I went through the telephone book and I got the name McKenzie.”
Paul wrote the first verse alone, and then finished the song in the music room of John’s Kenwood home. According to Pete Shotton, one of Lennon’s oldest friends, who was there, Paul played the song and the others suggested ideas. George Harrison, he said, came up with the “Ah, look at all the lonely people” section.
And Ringo, he said, suggested the lyric “writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear,” and also that the priest should be darning socks.
In 1971, though, Lennon said he wrote “a good half of the lyrics or more” and years later said he wrote all of it but the first verse. McCartney said that John helped only with a few words.
On “Michelle,” however, Lennon’s contribution was more substantial, and is undisputed. McCartney had the tune for awhile, which he made up for fun at a party imitating Juliette Greco’s French songs. Like other songs written on a lark, he realized it could be serious, so turned to his friend Ivan Vaughan, who taught French, to help him with a name for the song and some French lyrics which worked. Vaughan suggested “Michelle, ma belle,” as well as other lines.
Lennon contributed its visceral chorus section, a great example of their different personalities coming into play. As McCartney dances melodically and bilingually around the heart of the song, Lennon nails down its essence by repeating, in English, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He said later it was inspired by Nina Simone’s recording of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You.”
“Hey Jude” was one written by Paul, originally directed to John’s son Julian, and called “Hey Jules.” John did not co-write it, but encouraged Paul to leave a key line. He also felt it was Paul’s strongest song ever. Though John did not always compliment Paul through the years, he never held back his love for this song.
“That’s his best song,” John said in 1972. “It started off as a song about my son Julian because Paul was going to see him. Then he turned it into `Hey Jude.’ I always thought it was about me and Yoko, but he said it was about him and his.”
Paul recalled in 1974 that John encouraged him to retain lines Paul felt were dummy lyrics.
“I played it to John and Yoko,” said McCartney, “and I was saying, ‘These words won’t be on the finished version.’ Some of the words were: ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ and John was saying, ‘It’s great!’ I’m saying, ‘It’s crazy, it doesn’t make any sense at all.’ He’s saying, ‘Sure it does, it’s great.’ “
Lennon said more than once he felt the song was written for him, not his son. “I always heard it as a song to me,” Lennon said in 1980. “Now I’m sounding like one of those fans reading things into it… Think about it: Yoko had just come into the picture. He is saying. ‘Hey, Jude’ — ‘Hey, John.’ Subconsciously, he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all, because he didn’t want to lose his partner.”
In 1994, McCartney revealed that the record’s famous dynamics, in which the drums don’t kick in for some while, was not entirely intentional.
“Ringo walked out to go to the toilet and I hadn’t noticed,” Paul recalled. “The toilet was only a few yards from his drum booth, but he’d gone past my back and I still thought he was in his drum booth. I started what was the actual take — and ‘Hey Jude’ goes on for hours before the drums come in — and while I was doing it I suddenly felt Ringo tiptoeing past my back rather quickly, trying to get to his drums. And just as he got to his drums, boom boom boom, his timing was absolutely impeccable.”
Despite famous disputes over who wrote what, both Lennon and McCartney had great respect for each other’s songwriting talents. John famously criticized Paul’s old-fashioned musical hall-inspired songs such as “When I’m 64,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Your Mother Should Know,” which he called “Paul’s granny songs,” and lambasted others. Yet he didn’t deny the greatness of many of them, and some he praised generously. He called “Hey Jude” Paul’s greatest song, as quoted here. But of all of them said “Here, There and Everywhere” was McCartney’s ultimate masterpiece. That opinion, Paul said, coming from John, was rare. And meant more to him than any praise ever.
