Was The Beatles’ greatest song written for Aretha Franklin?
The Fab Four had a knack for crafting songs with a long lifespan, and perhaps the most enduring of all is Paul McCartney’s ‘Let It Be’ – featured on the 1970 album of the same name. To this day, it remains one of the group’s most beloved recordings, somehow encapsulating the shifting brilliance of The Beatles in a mere four minutes. It might come as a shock to learn, therefore, that McCartney may well well have written the song not for The Beatles but for the great American soul singer Aretha Franklin.
As fans of American R&B, The Beatles were inevitably drawn to Franklin’s music. In their early days, they’d performed covers of the Shirelles, Ray Charles and the Marvelettes, and wound up incorporating the vitality of those artists into their highly lucrative brand of transatlantic pop. When Aretha Franklin released her debut album, I Never Loved a Man ( The Way I Love You), in 1967, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were some of the most famous people on the planet, having already spearheaded the British chart invasion of the mid-60s and established themselves as the cultural gatekeepers of the era.
That album cemented Franklin as The Beatles’ musical equal, allowing her the freedom to remould their recordings as she saw fit. In 1968, she released a cover of ‘Eleonar Rigby’ sung in first-person, completely altering the novelistic scope of McCartney’s original. The Beatles clearly respected Franklin’s ability to make a song her own, so much so that when Paul McCartney wrote ‘Let It Be’, he sent an acetate demo to the singer in the hope that she’d record it, which of course she did.
Considering it was released in January 1970, a whole two months before The Beatles’ version came out, you could even call Franklin’s recording of ‘Let It Be’ the original. McCartney sent a demo of the track to Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler, offering Franklin the right to first release. While we can’t say for certain whether McCartney wrote the song specifically for Franklin, it’s possible he wrote it with her in mind. Either way, he wouldn’t have offered Franklin the song so early had he not wanted it to become firmly associated with the singer.
Franklin went on to record an unusually faithful rendition of ‘Let it Be’ featuring a sax solo by the great King Curtis. Wexler felt confident the track was going to be a hit, but Franklin refused to release it as a single, instead burying it among other Beatles covers on her album This Girl’s In Love With You. The Beatles subsequently decided to release their own version of the song and handed Wexler a legal notice barring him from releasing the Franklin version as a single.
Aretha and the Fab Four remained close despite the legalities, and the singer went on to record further covers of Beatles songs such as ‘The Fool on The Hill’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’. When Franklin died on August 16th, 2018, Paul McCartney said: “Let’s all take a moment to give thanks for the beautiful life of Aretha Franklin, the Queen of our souls, who inspired us all for many many years.”
Check out Franklin’s take on ‘Let It Be’ below.
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