Graham Reid | | 1 min read
The album With the Beatles captured the essence of Beatlemania of the period. In the US some of the tracks, along with I Want to Hold Your Hand and songs from their Please Please Me debut album in Britain, were repackaged into Meet the Beatles.
And that was what Americans heard.
Then there was the US Beatles' Second Album which was very rock'n'roll and a pretty good as a compilation. But again it was an example of how Americans misheard the Beatles.
That Second Album however confirmed why US commentators said the Beatles were simply giving American music back to them, albeit with three guitars, drums and three male vocalists.
Certainly the Beatles owed a huge debt to American music, and they freely conceded that.
But sometimes the influence was more subtle, as with It Won't Be Long which was on With the Beatles and Meet the Beatles.
It sounds like a very typical Beatles' song from the period.
It Won't Be Long written by Lennon-McCartney
But here is the same song covered -- and in this you can hear it deconstructed and reassembled. It could be a Marvin Gaye/Motown/Memphis soul song because it had those elements of call-response in it.
It Won't Be Long, the James Hunter Six
So the Beatles, when they wrote original songs at this time, leaned on what they knew (call-response, harmonies) which they had learned from American soul and R'n'B and were now intuitive.
And let's not get started on what happened after they heard Bob Dylan.
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For more oddities, one-offs or songs with an interesting backstory check the massive back-catalogue at From the Vaults.
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