The Beatles, for all their well -documented love of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and The Everly
Brothers, somehow ‘came out of nowhere’ and ‘re-wrote the rules’ of songwriting by ‘drawing a line under all that went before’.
It is surely this common language of pop music (in which various obvious and not - so -obvious devices are up for grabs at any point in a song) that McCartney has in mind when he acknowledges that ‘a great artist steals’
While we’re on the notorious bVI, we can’t help but speculate on the origins of the great deceptive ending that appears in
McCartney’s ‘I Will’. Now, what could have prompted Macca here?
everything
you’ve ever heard. From The Beatles to Mozart. You’re not born with a quartz crystal that invents tunes.
An essential comparison can be made with The Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ - a fixture, remember , on The Beatles’
favourite Hamburg jukebox .
The Platters may have lacked cute Mop Tops and cool guitars but as with all these connections, cast aside your non -musical preconceptions for a moment. Forget the artists, the instrumentation and other textural issues and focus on the mechanics of the music. How does the song work? In both cases the secondary dominant harmonises the strong chord tone - not merely for a melodic peak but clearly as the moment of musical ecstasy in the song. It forms a watershed that separates the build- up of the opening bars and the winding-down that follows.
In each case that tension is released precisely through harmony that moves chromatically up a half step to the subdominant, before ‘releasing’ back to the tonic. The Platters go for a familiar ‘ I- vi-ii-V-I’ Cycle Of Fifths, dosing with a deft 5- 6- 8 melodic cadence; while The Beatles opt for the more primitive variation to support a standard 3 -2- 1 descent. Reduced to their basics, both songs work by creating a highly distinctive moment of euphoria using essentially the same musical premise.
Is there no way that The Beatles could have been influenced by Sheridan’s song? After all, they played on it. Of course , this move is just the jazzier version of I-iii-IV-V as found in the bridge of ‘I Feel Fine’. And similarly, that more primitive sequence (but still novel for the times) has an essential pre -Beatles counterpart in the verse of Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ from 1958.
Is there no way that The Beatles could have been influenced by Sheridan’s song? After all, they played on it. Of course , this move is just the jazzier version of I-iii-IV-V as found in the bridge of ‘I Feel Fine’. And similarly, that more primitive sequence (but still novel for the times) has an essential pre -Beatles counterpart in the verse of Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ from 1958.
With so many unusual chords being batted about, the connection between the two bridges might not be immediately obvious. The
fo llowing chart summarises the harmony , and confirms some obvious parallels, as well as some subtle differences. To make things
easier, the Roman numerals ignore the implied modulations and are expressed in relation to the verse key of E major throughout.
of the whole concept of ‘unexpected harmony’, a principle that defines so many Beatles originals.
Given how highly we know McCartney regards this move, it is inconceivable that this Boudleaux and Felice Bryant composition was not a powerful influence on John and Paul as they came to write their 1963 gems. The Holly song was a feature in Beatles live sets from its release in 1959 through to 1962, the year before the success of ‘From Me To You’
