The 1959 song Ringo Starr couldn’t live without: “I love it”
The unfair derision that Ringo Starr faced due to a fabricated quote wrongly attributed to John Lennon has made many people underestimate him for decades.
However, Starr is somebody who has fought against all odds his whole life, and even now, he is somehow defying the ageing process. Music fell into his life when he needed it most as a child, when he started to drum while hospitalised with tuberculosis. The instrument allowed him to escape his health issues, and soon enough, he knew that his life would be devoted to playing the instrument.
Nevertheless, Starr, who started playing in a hospital band with other children, could never have foreseen what lay ahead. Once he’d regained his health, Starr made drumming his everything, taking him from Liverpool to Hamburg, and eventually to the top of the charts with The Beatles.
He was the final piece of the jigsaw that made The Beatles tick, elevated their sound to new heights, while also drawing the best out of his bandmates. Starr wasn’t a typical rock drummer, either, which can be, in part, due to his vast record collection that spans various genres and eras.
However, while you can expect him to listen to anything from across the musical spectrum, there is one song that Starr adores more than anything else in the world, which is a Ray Charles recording from 1959.
Naming your favourite song of all time is one of the most difficult questions you can face as a music fan, and the answer can change on a daily basis. Thankfully, Ringo didn’t opt out of answering the challenging line of questioning when he appeared on CBC in 2005, opting for ‘Tell The Truth’ from the masterful soul singer.
Explaining his decision, he said: “I love it, I love the live version. Just always blowing me away. In all honesty, that’s very unfair because there are so many songs. People say, ‘Put your top ten′, I can’t. I just cannot do that. It’s a really broad spectrum of music I love.”
While The 5 Royales originally recorded the track, and it was not written by Charles, it is undoubtedly now his song. With his wondrous cover, ownership swiftly changed hands after Charles first covered it in 1959 and moulded it in his distinctive way, rendering any other recording of the song to be redundant.
Starr also has a personal connection with Charles, too. The late soul singer’s story overlapped with the Fab Four’s on many occasions throughout their tenure. Most importantly, if it hadn’t been for his influence, The Beatles may have never brought Billy Preston into their camp, which added a new dimension to their sound.
They first met Preston years prior, when he played with Little Richard in Hamburg while The Beatles were also in the German city. However, they sadly lost touch as their lives spiralled in differing directions. Then, in a twist of fate, George Harrison saw Preston in London performing alongside Charles in 1967, which put them back in touch.
While Charles was none the wiser, he played a role in Starr proving to The Beatles that he was the real deal. When Paul McCartney inducted Starr into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, he remembered covering Charles’ ‘What I’d Say’ with Ringo. This was the song they used to test the credentials of drummers, which Starr passed with flying colours.
McCartney recalled: “Most of the drummers couldn’t nail the drum part. It was a little difficult to do. But Ringo nailed it. I remember the moment just standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, that was ‘the moment.’ So you know, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.”
When the Fab Four were covering Charles during rehearsals in Liverpool in the 1960s, it would have seemed outlandish for him to even one day be aware of their existence. Yet, in the short space of a handful of years, he was the one covering them, most notably taking on ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby‘.
Despite everything that The Beatles achieved and the countless records they broke, I imagine few things were sweeter for Ringo than hearing the man who made his favourite song of all time covering his band’s work.
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