Paul McCartney - George Harrison - The Beatles

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What is the oldest song covered by The Beatles?

Mon 7 October 2024 19:45, UK

While the songwriting of John Lennon and Paul McCartney was something which set The Beatles apart from their peers from the moment they began recording, four of the band’s first five studio albums do include songs by other artists. The inclusion of covers was partly out of necessity, as Lennon, McCartney, and, to a lesser extent, George Harrison hadn’t yet honed their craft as songwriters to the extent that they could churn out a whole album’s worth of songs.

But it was also an important part of the group’s live performances, which featured vibrant, charismatic renditions of the R&B numbers they knew and loved. Songs like ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Rock and Roll Music’ weren’t just chosen at random during the recording process for the early Beatles albums. They were firm favourites from the band’s shows in Liverpool and Hamburg, the sound of which they were trying to replicate onto their records.

As well as these upbeat rock and roll numbers, however, the band threw several show tunes into the mix. On their debut LP Please Please Me there was ‘A Taste of Honey’, while ‘Till There Was You’ was prepared specially for their Royal Variety performance in front of the Queen Mother, before it ended up on With the Beatles. These songs were chosen to diversify the sound of their albums, and to appeal to a slightly older demographic to the typical Beatles audience of teenage girls.

That’s not to say these songs were the oldest that The Beatles recorded, though. Their vocal-pop and musical theatre numbers were all first published at the end of the 1950s or at the start of the 1960s, and so weren’t as old as the rock and roll standards they borrowed from Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and Bully Holly.

So, which song came first?

In fact, the oldest song The Beatles covered was, in a sense, one they took from Perkins. ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’, which George Harrison sings as the final track on 1964’s Beatles for Sale, was recorded by Perkins in 1956, and he’s credited as the songwriter. Yet it was actually a much older song, written and released by country singer Rex Griffin in 1936. Perkins’ version was itself a cover, with some minor adjustments to the lyrics and song structure, which he passed off as his own.

According to the record books, then, ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’ wouldn’t technically be the oldest song The Beatles covered, since officially they were “covering” Perkins’ 1956 version. Instead, the title would go to another Beatles for Sale track ‘Kansas City’, which was published by legendary songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in 1952, and recorded by R&B artist Little Willie Littlefield that same year. The Beatles combine this song with Little Richard’s ‘Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!’ in a clever experiment that doesn’t really come off.

If we were to stretch things a little, we could even choose another song as the oldest recorded by the band. The outtake snippet of John Lennon singing ‘Maggie Mae’, that somehow ended up on Let It Be, is actually a 200-year-old folk song sung by British mariners since the early 19th century. It also inspired the title of Rod Stewart’s breakout hit ‘Maggie May’ a year later. But it’s hard to call Let It Be version a cover, not least because The Beatles’ recording of it could hardly be called a song. And secondly, because the song is a traditional folk standard without a known author.

So the authorship of the oldest song covered by The Beatles belongs either to Rex Griffin or to Leiber and Stoller, depending on how we interpret the songwriting credit for ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’. Take your pick.