Posted on 07/09/2003 1:25:11 AM PDT by weegee
Did McCartney's Yesterday get a nudge from Nat?
Times of London
Sunday, July 06, 2003
Music experts say Sir Paul McCartney subconsciously borrowed the melody of his classic ballad Yesterday from a Nat King Cole record.
The origins of Yesterday, which has been recorded by more than 2,000 artists and played on the radio more than six million times, has always been a mystery -- not least to McCartney himself.
He woke up in his flat in London in May 1965 with the song in his head. He realized that he might have borrowed the arrangement from another song and asked friends if they could suggest any similar tunes. They convinced him it was his and that it had come to him in a dream.
Now musicologists have identified echoes of Answer Me, the 1953 U.K. hit for both Frankie Laine and David Whitfield, which was later covered by Cole.
They say the melodies, the rhythmic phrasing, the musical cadences and even the words strongly resemble each other.
The experts believe that McCartney, aged 11, heard Cole's version and retained it in his subconscious until he came to write the music for Yesterday 11 years later.
The lyrics were written later on a drive from Lisbon to the Algarve with his then girlfriend, Jane Asher, the actress.
They include: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they're here to stay."
Answer Me has the lines: "Yesterday I believed that love was here to stay, won't you tell me where I've gone astray."
The similarity was spotted by Spencer Leigh, a pop historian who has interviewed McCartney on a program that he hosts on Radio Merseyside.
Leigh explored the links between the songs for a book about the Beatles called The Walrus was Ringo.
He said: "McCartney was working with this melody in his head which he realized was a cracking tune. He was playing it to people saying, 'Don't you recognize this?'
"I wonder what might have happened if somebody had said, 'Isn't it like Answer Me?' He might have forgotten Yesterday and we would have lost one of the world's great songs."
Leigh's co-author, Alan Clayson, who has written separate biographies of the Beatles, said: "It is not plagiarism. He was worried that he had subconsciously lifted it."
Dominic Pedler, who deconstructs songs to show how musicians came to write them, supports the Answer Me theory in his forthcoming book, The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles.
"There are some uncanny similarities: the overlap of lyrics, the multiple rhyming emphasis on words ending with 'ay,' the similar scan of the songs," he said.
"McCartney didn't hijack the song, but he must have been inspired by it."
None of the other Beatles played during the song and would leave McCartney to perform it alone on stage.
Released as a single in the United States it immediately went to Number One.
Hunter Davies, the Beatles' official biographer, said: "Paul will remember Answer Me. It was a popular ballad before rock 'n' roll came along. I have never thought it was similar to Yesterday, but I can vaguely see it now."
However, Geoff Baker, McCartney's spokesman, said: "To me the two songs are about as similar as Get Back and God Save the Queen."
© Copyright 2003 Calgary Herald
2 posted on 3/6/02 7:30 AM Pacific by grammymoon:
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