“Made for me”: the artist that made George Harrison love guitar
When The Beatles were first getting started, rock and roll was still in its infancy. There were people like Elvis Presley who had become globally known, but the lion’s share of the British invasion bands were the ones that helped bring rock and roll to a global scale. So that meant that every single member of the Fab Four had to have that lightbulb moment on their own, but before they even came together, George Harrison was by far the most natural musician that the band had to offer.
When looking at how everyone was approaching their instrument, Harrison was far more interested in making his guitar sing. Despite being considerably younger than the rest of his mates, he was the first to know the ins and outs of his instrument, usually playing the same chords higher up on the neck and discovering different inversions that made the band’s sound a bit more vibrant than usual.
And while the rest of the group tried to keep up, Harrison was never satisfied with taking the easy route when it came to writing songs, either. Some of his best tunes involved taking songs in different directions or using strange time signatures, so when Paul McCartney made quirky, lighthearted tunes like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, it made it harder to go back to it when ‘Something’ came on directly beforehand.
But the intricacies of the guitar were already going strong well before Harrison had started. The biggest names in jazz, like Joe Pass and Django Reinhart, had started reforming what most people thought of the guitar’s role in popular music, and while the biggest names in rock and roll were tame by comparison, Lonnie Donegan was one of the few proud to fly the flag for the genre from across the pond.
“I’d been aware of pop singers before him…”
george harrison
After all, The Beatles got their chops by becoming a skiffle group, and Donegan was among the first to introduce British shores to that style. It wasn’t exactly as high-energy as Chuck Berry or Little Richard, but it’s easy to draw a decent throughline from the first skiffle bands and the kind of manic energy that Paul McCartney used when writing tunes like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’.
Even if skiffle was a mainstay of every member’s life, Harrison remembered finally getting the itch to play guitar after listening to Donegan, saying, “I’d been aware of pop singers before him, like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, but never really taken much interest in then. I don’t think I thought I was old enough for them. But Lonnie Donegan and skiffle just seemed made for me.”
Although Harrison took a lot more technical marvels from other rock and roll tunes, there’s plenty of skiffle influence when looking at his first tunes with The Beatles. He did seem a touch hesitant when looking at some of his lead work on Please Please Me, but when he does decide to take a solo, a lot of his leads are a lot more in line with what his roots had to offer, usually sticking to playing different extensions of chords and going back to the same blues scald that every guitarist can’t get enough of starting out.
Donegan might have been Harrison’s first taste of guitar, but there was a lot more ground for him to cover. This was only the baby steps from someone bound to become a giant, but the first step is always the most important to get someone sold on a genre for life.
