“Wow”: The artist who inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write songs
No group has had as colossal or enduring an impact on the music industry as The Beatles. From the release of their debut album in 1962 to their grand finale, Let It Be, in 1970, the industry changed in countless ways. Throughout their tenure, the band always embraced new production techniques and technologies and pursued bold new avenues of musical expression. Perhaps their most radical contribution to the industry, however, was the simple fact that The Beatles wrote their own songs.
Self-penned pop songs are no novelty in the modern musical age; the term ‘singer-songwriter’ has lost a lot of its allure, due to being applicable to an increasingly broad spectrum of artists who write their own material. However, this has certainly not always been the case. Back in the 1960s, the vast majority of pop hits were written by professional songwriters, usually employed by a record label, and dished out to artists to record. This is where The Beatles differed from the majority of their contemporaries.
Ever since their teenage years back in the 1950s, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been writing their own original songs. These early contributions to The Quarrymen certainly weren’t as profound or timeless as tracks like ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but the very fact that the young musicians bothered to write their own material was revolutionary in and of itself.
Given that the musical masses had not yet accepted this practice of performing self-penned material, the early years of The Beatles also saw the band perform and record a variety of cover songs and standards. This diverse range of cover songs allowed the band to pay homage to their broad range of influences, ranging from the Motown-infused sounds of With The Beatles to the high-energy Little Richard tracks the band would often slip into their live sets.
In particular, the band performed various covers of tracks by rock and roll pioneer Buddy Holly. “Buddy Holly was completely different; he was out of Nashville, so that introduced us to the country music scene,” Paul McCartney reflected in Anthology.
“I still like Buddy’s vocal style. And his writing.” Much like the Fab Four, Holly was a young man when he achieved mainstream success, and he wrote the vast majority of his own material, separating him from the rest of the early rock and roll scene.
Seemingly, it was the fact that Buddy Holly wrote his work that inspired Lennon and McCartney to do the same. “One of the main things about The Beatles is that we started out writing our own material. People these days take it for granted that you do, but nobody used to then,” Macca recalled. “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly. It was like, ‘Wow! He writes and is a musician.’”
In addition to spurring the band on to write and record their own material, Buddy Holly further inspired The Beatles to record various covers in homage to his pioneering music. A notable highlight of these Holly covers is ‘Words of Love’, first released by Buddy Holly in 1957 and recorded by The Beatles in 1964 for their Beatles for Sale album, reflecting the last influence of Holly on the band’s songwriting and overall existence.
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