Paul McCartney reveals his early guitar heroes
Alongside John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, The Beatles’ most enduring songwriter, Paul McCartney, changed the face of popular music almost single-handedly throughout the 1960s and beyond.
Together, the Beatles began their mission as the four ordinary lads from Liverpool, writing primarily of a youthful thirst for love and money but ended it garbed like the Scooby-Doo roster singing of yellow submarines, walruses, tangerine trees and ten-thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.
The early Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership put the swing into the ’60s, adding much-welcomed colour and energy to a grey post-war climate. While their early efforts may have been eclipsed by the latter, more experimental and seminal releases, The Beatles’ first five albums served as a vital bridge between their musical influences of the 1950s and the exciting path ahead.
It is well documented that McCartney and Lennon set out on early gigs and jam sessions under the covering fire of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly covers, but when listening to the band’s early material, the sound is one of a broader convergence with a little more at play.
In an interview with Classic Rock Magazine in 2007, McCartney discussed the breadth of his early pool of influence. “I listened a lot to Lead Belly, to all of those guys,” he revealed. “But I never got stuck in one groove. One day it would be, ‘Oh wow, Chuck Berry!’ and the next, ‘Oh wow, Scotty Moore!’ I was a bit of a magpie, really, picking up various styles and gradually assimilating them. It’s probably a bit of the same in my vocal thing, you know. I loved Elvis and sang some songs trying to be like him. But then I also had my Little Richard stuff.”
Elsewhere in that same interview, McCartney was asked about his early infatuation with the guitar and whether any one guitar hero inspired his exploits.
“Well, my interest in fingerpicking came from Chet Atkins,” the former Beatle recalled. “I remember a lot of us tried to learn ‘Trambone’, an instrumental that’s on an album of his called Down Home. Otherwise, I loved Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and [skiffle legend] Lonnie Donegan’s guitarist, Denny Wright, who was fantastic. I liked acoustic folk playing by Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.”
Listen to Chet Atkins’ ‘Trambone’ below.
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