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Which artist’s songs did The Beatles cover the most?

Tue 15 October 2024 19:00, UK

Long before their personal charisma impressed Parlophone Records head George Martin enough to take a chance on them in June 1962, The Beatles were thrilling Liverpool with a repertoire of R&B covers. They got through amphetamine-fuelled ten-hour stints in half-empty Hamburg clubs on hits by Chuck Berry and Little Richard. And they accrued a faithful following of teenage girls with renditions of vocal-pop classics like the Coasters’ single ‘Searchin’’.

Several tracks from their initial setlists made it onto the albums With the Beatles and Beatles for Sale, including Barrett Strong’s 1959 R&B hit ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’, and Little Richard’s ‘Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!’. Both Berry and Little Richard were covered twice by The Beatles. George Harrison sang a cover of the former’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ on With the Beatles, while the latter’s 1956 single ‘Long Tall Sally’ became a staple closing number of the band’s performances on their first US tour in 1964 and became the title track of their second UK EP the same year.

The group’s debut album Please Please Me generally leant more into softer, slower tracks for its non-original material to balance out the hard-edged rock and roll of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Please Please Me’ and its standout cover ‘Twist and Shout’. And so, two Shirelles songs feature on the LP: the Tin Pan Alley standard ‘Baby It’s You’, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and ‘Boys’, on which Ringo Starr sings the lead vocal.

But Chuck Berry, Little Richard and The Shirelles are all outdone by another artist who’d served as an inspiration for The Beatles since their earliest iterations as a group of high-schoolers. They later recognised his influence by covering no fewer than three of his songs he penned on their records. And no, it’s not Buddy Holly, whose backing band, The Crickets, inspired the name the Fab Four eventually adopted. Holly’s ‘Words of Love’ is the only one of his compositions that made it onto a Beatles album.

So, who did they cover three times?

The singer-songwriter who had the honour of being covered three times by The Beatles was rockabilly star Carl Perkins, who’s most famous for his composition ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. This song had already contributed to making Elvis Presley rock and roll’s first megastar by the time a 15-year-old George Harrison was impressing John Lennon with the range of Perkins guitar parts he could play for the Quarrymen. When the Quarrymen became The Beatles, Harrison kept the Perkins tunes in his back pocket, plucking them out when required.

And the Perkins composition ‘Matchbox’ was required for the band’s 1962 residence at the Star Club. It was then revived for the Long Tall Sally EP in June 1964 with Ringo singing before two more Perkins songs appeared on Beatles for Sale later that year. Again, ‘Honey Don’t’ featured the group’s drummer on lead vocals, while Harrison closed out the album singing ‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’, a song which Perkins himself had nabbed from hillbilly singer Rex Griffin.

It made a certain amount of sense that The Beatles would cover Perkins twice on what’s seen in retrospect as their “country-and-western” album. But from that point on, the band had little time to record other people’s songs, as their studio sessions were overflowing with brilliantly original compositions by Lennon, Paul McCartney and Harrison. Perkins had helped show them the ropes, particularly in the case of Harrison’s guitar-playing. But they’d moved beyond the rock and roll of their formative years and were standing at the vanguard of entirely new musical frontiers.