The first song Paul McCartney ever wrote
As perhaps the most successful songwriter of all time, it seemed as though Paul McCartney would have had a prodigious start to music-making. In reality, McCartney wasn’t writing his own material until he was at least a teenager. Before that, it was all music hall tunes on the piano and failed attempts to play the trumpet.
Getting a guitar at age 14 proved to be a major turning point in McCartney’s songwriting journey. Shortly after trading in his trumpet for a Framus Zenith acoustic guitar, McCartney discovered how to restring it to suit his left-handedness. The final creative push came from a far more tragic event: four months after starting to learn the guitar, McCartney’s mother, Mary, died in a surgical procedure to treat her breast cancer.
“I wrote that when I was fourteen just after I’d lost my mother,” McCartney said in the book Many Years From Now. “I don’t think the song was about that but of course, any psychiatrist getting hold of those two bits of information would say it was. It’s fairly obvious with a title like ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.”
“I started writing songs because now I could play and sing at the same time,” McCartney claimed in Anthology. “I wrote my first when I was fourteen. It was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ – ‘I woke up this morning, my head was in a whirl, only then I realised, lost my little girl, uh, huh, huh.’ It’s a funny, corny little song based on three chords – G,G7 and C. I liked the way one melody line went down and the other went up, which I think is called contrary motion. It was a very innocent little song. All my first songs, including that one, were written on the Zenith.”
There remains some debate as to whether ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ was truly the first song that McCartney ever wrote. Other candidates include ‘Call It Suicide’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, which McCartney possibly wrote on the piano before obtaining his guitar. In 1991, while discussing his MTV Unplugged special that featured ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, McCartney confirmed that ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was written after ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.
“Anything that I had written on an acoustic was considered. Like ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, which we also thought about for Unplugged but just didn’t fancy in the end. And ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, the first song I ever wrote, at 14, was written on the guitar. After that I wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, but that was on piano. ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ is a very innocent little song – G, G7, C – but quite interesting because the chords go down as the melody goes up; it’s a clear musical trick, but it’s also interesting to see such ideas around in my first song.”
Check out ‘I Lost My Little Girl’ down below.
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