The Beatles song that Paul McCartney lifted from a classic poem
The Beatles were never above a little bit of inspiration from outside sources when it came to writing their own music.
John Lennon was a notorious observer, taking in everything from newspaper articles (‘A Day in the Life’) to breakfast cereal commercials (‘Good Morning Good Morning’) to circus posters (‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’), and that was just from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band alone.
Paul McCartney found his own inspirations in the world around him, and when he was sitting at the piano in his childhood home in 1969, he came across a piece of sheet music for a lullaby left by his stepsister Ruth. It was a version of Thomas Dekker’s ‘Cradle Song’ from the play Patient Grissel set to music, with the verses going as follows:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
“I was playing the piano in Liverpool in my dad’s house, and my stepsister Ruth’s piano book was up on the stand,” McCartney recalled in Barry Miles’ book Many Years From Now. “I was flicking through it and I came to ‘Golden Slumbers’. I can’t read music and I couldn’t remember the old tune, so I just started playing my own tune to it. I liked the words so I kept them, and it fitted with another bit of song I had.”
Lennon confirmed the source of inspiration, even if he was off on the dating of the poem by a century. “That’s Paul, apparently from a poem he found in a book, some eighteenth-century book where he just changed the words here and there,” Lennon told David Scheff in 1980.
McCartney became the second Beatle to write a lullaby for the band with ‘Golden Slumbers’. Only a few months prior, Lennon had written a bedtime track for his son Julian that eventually became the closing track on The Beatles, better known as The White Album. Although Lennon wrote ‘Good Night’, Ringo Starr was tapped to sing the final version of the song.
Check out ‘Golden Slubmers’ down below.
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