CLASSIC ROCK
Who Really Influenced The Beatles?
Maybe there are some artists and genres here you didn’t realise
There are certain moments in music and culture when everything changes. The Beatles were responsible for one such moment between 1963 and 1970 and are arguably, the most significant musical artists of the 20th century and possibly ever.
Even though they were artistically talented and highly intelligent individuals with many innovative ideas, all musicians and composers take their ideas and inspiration from other artists. They then mix it up, change it around, and produce new work.
So who were the Beatle's influences and where did their innovations stem from?
All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Variations on a theme — John Lennon.
It’s how you vary this theme and make it sound fresh and new that marks out the greatest songwriters like the Beatles from the rest of the pack.
Isn’t The Beatles' music based on US 50s Rock & Roll and Blues?
Some articles have stated The Beatles merely took US rock & roll and blues and repackaged it with a British twist. This was possibly the case with some sixties British pop acts, maybe the early Rolling Stones and The Animals, but even the most superficial listen to Beatles music shows that whilst US rock & roll was an influence in some cases, it was merely one of many.
Of the 188 songs composed and recorded by the band, only fifteen used elements of the 12-bar music structure dominant in rock and roll and blues and only a further five or six (e.g. This Boy, Tell Me Why) used parts of the 50s ‘Doo-Wop’ style such as heard on 50s classics such as Blueberry Hill, The Great Pretender etc.
Of these fifteen 12-bar blues songs, only three follow the structure without modification. The remainder used it as an element of a more complex song and veered off into other musical genres, styles and innovations.
Everything else the boys did was primarily based on other influences rather than US rock & roll.
The Beatles were very open about the artists they admired and who influenced them. Sometimes, though, you need to dig a little deeper to get the full picture as it’s more complex.
The Beatles have often mentioned Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley and The Everly Brothers as key influences. This is true but there are many, many others.
So who really influenced the Beatles?
The Ancient Greeks and Pythagoras
The earliest documentary evidence of today’s Western musical notation, scales and theory, comes from Mesopotamia from around 2,000 BC. This area today contains parts of Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Syria.
1,500 years later and Ancient Greece was the centre of musical development. The Greeks knew about music theory and complex musical concepts such as the Cycle of Fifths which explains the relationships between musical keys.
Pythagoras, when he wasn’t working out how to calculate triangles, noted the relationships between the musical notes that now make up Western music scales. He documented the numerical ratios that exist between these harmonious notes.
Western musical tuning is known as Pythagorean tuning.
So although the Beatles developed and changed many of the rules of popular music and how we use them, everything they did was based on the same music scales and modes used by the Ancient Greeks over 2,000 years ago.
Indeed, all Western music today, whether rock, folk, blues, classical or jazz, uses pretty much the same scales and modes as those heard in ancient Greece. The seven musical modes used in Western music today even have Greek names.
The use of musical scales and modes is important for an understanding of Beatles music and why the band were so different to what went before and were so revolutionary.
To understand this we need to know some of the basics of musical scales and modes.
There are just 12 musical notes which are repeated by octaves and each note is separated by what is called a semi-tone.
A musical scale is a set of 7 notes within the 12 available. Think doh, ray, me etc as performed in the Sound Of Music. This is the major scale.
A major scale, let’s say the scale of C, is 7 notes separated by a sequence that goes whole tone — whole tone — half tone — whole tone — whole tone — whole tone and a half tone: C, D, E, F, G, A, B; all the piano white notes when we use the key of C.
If you look at the piano keyboard below and start from the far left of the image, a C note, there is a half tone between each white and black key and between the white keys of E & F and B&C where there is no black key.
You’ll see that the sequence is then repeated after the 12 notes but at a higher pitch (an octave).
This type of major scale is also called the Ionian mode. A Greek name unsurprisingly. The major (Ionian) scale has a bright and cheerful sound and major modes are the most common mode for pop and rock & roll; think Johnny B Goode, Good Golly Miss Molly and Kansas City.
If you now start your scale at D which is the second white key from the left above, and use exactly the same white notes, you can see the keyboard spacings have changed for the seven white notes of the scale. If you then start it on the E note, they change again.
Each change gives a different mode and a different sound for the music and each one has a Greek name.
Each mode sounds different to the ear and The Beatles were very aware of these mode sounds even if they were unlikely to know what they were called.
There are also minor modes which sound sadder. Think of Eleanor Rigby and Fool On The Hill, for example. The key of A minor (Aeolian mode), for example, uses the same notes as the C major but starts in a different place — A, so the spacings are different and the sound is sadder and more melancholic.
The Beatles used the theory of music modes extensively to give their songs the feeling and meanings we have all heard from the joy of She Loves You — major mode and cheerful, to She’s Leaving Home — minor mode and sad.
They often swapped between modes within one song to give emphasis to the lyrics or to change emotions for certain sections.
We can hear the effect of mode changes on Norwegian Wood, Golden Slumbers and We Can Work It Out where they even changed time signatures from standard rock 4/4 to waltz-time 3/4 for the bridge.
The differing emotions, sounds and atmospheres within the entire range of Beatles songs are thanks to those modes from back in the days of ancient Greece.
Medieval Europeans and 19th-Century American Luthiers
The guitar and the piano are the prevalent instrumental sounds in Beatles music. The guitar was first developed over 4oo years earlier in Western Europe. Around the same time, an Italian gentleman called Bartolomeo Cristofori created the first piano by making changes to the harpsichord design.
The first appearance of a guitar-like instrument was the lute in 16th-century Europe. The lute was almost certainly based on the Arabic ud so once again we see Middle-Eastern roots for Western music.
An instrument called the vihuela emerged a little later in medieval Spain looking a lot more like today's acoustic guitar. There were various iterations and developments over the centuries in France, Italy and in Spain particularly.
In the mid to late 19th century, Orville Gibson and C F Martin developed acoustic guitars in the USA that were fully recognisable as the type of guitar we see today and were used by The Beatles.
Where would the Beatles songs such as And I Love Her, Blackbird, Here Comes The Sun, Julia and so on be without those Italian, French and Spanish guys from the 16th to 19th centuries?
I’m sure the Beatles would have still made great music but those songs would have been recorded on the lute, the ud or the harpsichord.
Actually, you can hear what that might have sounded like as the Beatles used a harpsichord on Piggies and a sped-up piano to sound like a harpsichord on In My Life.
George Beauchamp & Adolph Rickenbacker
Acoustic guitars and pianos formed a large part of the Beatles' repertoire. Another large part was based on the electric guitar.
The electric guitar is the fundamental sound of rock and roll and pop music from T-Bone Walker and Les Paul through to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, The Beatles and today’s bands.
George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbaker invented the electromagnetic guitar pickup and the first electric guitar was launched in 1931. John Lennon is forever associated with the Rickenbaker 325 guitar and McCartney used the Rickenbaker 4001 bass from 1965 onwards.
There would be no rock and roll sound without Beauchamp and Rickenbaker. We would never have had the electric rock sound of I Want To Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love, Get Back and And Your Bird Can Sing where the harmonised dual electric lead guitar riff from McCartney and Harrison was the groundbreaking beginning for many genres of rock music from that moment on.
Paul McCartney’s dad, John Dunstable & The Everly Brothers
The Beatles were one of the great vocal harmony groups. Harmony is the combination of the 1st or root note of a scale with one or more other notes of the scale simultaneously.
Pau McCartney’s father, James, an amateur musician, taught the young Paul all about harmony (and how to play the piano and many Music Hall songs).
Back in 15th-century Europe, harmony was made by combining the root note of a scale with the 4th and 5th notes. For the C major scale, this would be a C combined with either F or G. If you’re near a piano or guitar, press those notes together and you’ll hear a nice consonant sound.
They mix well together, as Pythagoras spotted, because they have a mathematical frequency ratio of 4/3 and 3/2 for C to G & F respectively. 3/2 just happens to be exactly between the two root notes in an octave.
In 15th-century England, however, a different harmonic approach was also in use. This type of harmony used notes 1 and 3 of a scale for harmony and also the 6th note.
This sound was less consonant as the ratio wasn’t so perfect but it was far sweeter. By the 16th century, thanks to European tours by English composer John Dunstable, the use of 3rds and 6th for harmony with the root note became established.
Why is this important? It’s because using 3rds and 6ths for harmony is the predominant harmony style of the Everly Brothers and Lennon and McCartney admired them so much, they adopted this vocal harmony approach for The Beatles.
Here’s one of their great harmony songs, If I Fell from 1964. The harmonies may be straight out of The Everly’s playbook but the complex musical song structure, particularly the intro where there is a chord not even in the scale and a modulation change is more typical of a George Gershwin or Cole Porter composition.
Buddy Holly, Little Richard & Carl Perkins
The Beatles loved 1950s/early 60s US rock & roll and several US artists influenced them. The Blues and rock & roll of this time can be traced back to the African music that arrived in the US through the slave trade and continues to have a great influence on US music and rock generally.
We see the call and response so prevalent in African music and from then into blues/rock & roll and onto Beatles songs like the Twist and Shout cover, Help, It Won’t Be Long and many others.
The boys even insert call and response into With A Little Help From My Friends where Ringo on lead vocal answers questions from John. The song is otherwise, British Music Hall genre.
Here’s a classic call-and-response on You’re Gonna Lose That Girl which also features 50s ‘Doo-Wop’ style. McCartney & Harrison respond to Lennon’s statements.
Lennon and McCartney said many times that Buddy Holly was one of their main influences. This was not only his music style but more importantly, that he played guitar, sang and wrote the songs himself.
The Beatles also used to cover many of Little Richard’s songs live in their early days and they were big fans. McCartney was influenced by Little Richard’s vocal style and used Richard’s phrasing and high throaty vocals for some of the Fab’s rock & roll songs such as Can’t Buy Me Love, Birthday and She’s a Woman.
You all know Can’t Buy Me Love and although Little Richard’s approach certainly influenced some of the verse, the Beatles made things far more interesting by mixing it up with other styles and kicking the whole thing off with a minor chord intro.
Listen once more to how the boys broke the mould and how Can’t Buy Me Love is a unique fusion of many different music genres including Rock & Roll, Big Band, Folk, Blues and Pop.
Religious music
Several Beatles songs use song structures, harmonies and styles taken from the religious music McCartney and Lennon heard and performed as young boys. McCartney was a choirboy at St Barnabas Church, Mossley Hill in Liverpool.
Hey Jude is a case in point. It isn’t difficult to hear that it has a hymn-like sound and indeed, replace Hey Jude with A-men on the final coda section and you’ll hear this very clearly. This A-Men sound is called a plagel cadence in music, a technique uncommon in popular music but common in hymns.
And if you ever wondered how McCartney was able to make the na-na-na coda at the end sound so celebratory, it’s all to do with those modes again. He used the standard F Lydian mode for the song but switched to F Mixolydian for the final coda to uplift the musical sound.
Hey Jude appears to borrow some of the verse melody from Te Deum, a 1907 hymn McCartney probably sang as a choir boy. Being the Beatles, they mix things up and we also switch to classical with a Bach-like step down on the bridge section.
Let It Be is not only exactly like a hymn, complete with plagel cadence on the last Let It Be of the chorus, but uses religious imagery in the lyrics. Mother Mary? A play on his mother’s name and Jesus’s mother of course.
And as a final proof of the influence of religious music on the Beatles, here’s a version of Because, originally from Abbey Road but remixed with isolated vocals for the Love album.
It showcases their incredible harmonies and points clearly to religious music and church choirs as a major musical influence for them.
British & US Folk Music
Earlier in this article I wrote about musical modes and how they use different note spacings to create different ambiences in music. This approach is uncommon in rock & roll.
The Beatles were masters in using modes (and modulation/key changes) to give their music emotion and ambience. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their songs inspired by British traditional folk music and later on, Bob Dylan.
Why do you think the folk-inspired Eleanor Rigby sounds so melancholic? It’s because the verse was written in the Dorian mode, a commonly used minor mode for folk music. The chorus is in another minor mode also used often in folk music, the Aeolian, where three scale notes are taken down a half tone compared to the major mode giving us that sense of musical melancholy.
Why do you think another folk-inspired song, She’s Leaving Home from Sgt Pepper sounds so sad? That’s because it uses the Dorian again but this time the song modulates between two different keys.
Other folk-inspired songs include Norwegian Wood, Dear Prudence, I’ve Just Seen A Face, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, I’m A Loser, Two Of Us, Julia and Blackbird. The last song also contains an acoustic guitar backing inspired by Bach’s Bourrée in E minor.
Not a lot of rock & roll or blues in that song set. None actually.
Indian Music
The Beatles broke away entirely from Western Music for some of their songs from 1965 to combine Indian music into their work.
George Harrison’s Within You Without You from the Sgt Pepper’s album and The Inner Light (Lady Madonna B-side) contain no Western musical influence whatsoever. They are entirely Indian music compositions.
Other songs that contain Indian musical influences include Across The Universe, Sexy Sadie, Norwegian Wood (sitar), Love You To, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, the Indian drone on Tomorrow Never Knows, I Am The Walrus and some that are less obvious such as Baby You’re A Rich Man (listen to Lennon’s section, “How Does it feel to be one of the beautiful people…”) and Lennon’s Jealous Guy, which started life as Child Of Nature, a Beatles outtake from The White Album.
Here’s The Inner Light, one of The Beatles' lesser-known songs since it was a non-album B-side. It’s not exactly rock & roll. It’s not rock & roll at all.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
As with many of their other influences, The Beatles were clear about the influence they owed to avant-garde musicians.
German composer Stockhausen’s influence can be heard in several of their songs, not least Tomorrow Never Knows, influenced by Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge. We also hear that influence in Revolution 9 and the avant-garde elements within A Day In The Life, Strawberry Fields, I Am The Walrus and many others.
A photo of Stockhausen appears on the cover of the Sgt Pepper’s album and apparently, the Stockhausen website contains a scan of a Christmas card from John Lennon to Stockhausen from 1969 although I couldn’t find it.
The Beatles also cite US avant-garde musician John Cage as an influence and used his ideas of musical randomness for parts of A Day In The Life.
British Music Hall
John Lennon referred somewhat disparagingly to several of Paul McCartney’s songs as Granny Music. What Lennon was talking about was the British Music Hall genre hugely popular in the UK during the 19th century and up to the 1920s when it became known as ‘Variety’ which is what the genre is called today
It was the music the Beatles' grandparents and parents listened to.
Music Hall developed in London in theatre venues known unsurprisingly as Music Halls. The US had a similar genre called Vaudeville.
Music Hall songs often contained comedy and lewd lyrics with double meanings, something the Beatles loved to do — Ticket To Ride, Penny Lane, I Am The Walrus, Polythene Pam etc. They also took this double-meaning approach and used it for disguising drug references — Got To Get You Into My Life, She Said She Said, Dr Robert and so on.
Here are a couple of examples of the British Music Hall styles from when The Beatles' grandparents would have gone to watch the shows.
Note the beat, song structure and musical style recreated in Beatles’ songs such as When I’m 64, Little Help From My Friends, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Honey Pie, Your Mother Should Know and Lovey Rita.
You’ll also recognise the singalong chorus style used in Yellow Submarine.
And here’s a contemporary film of a then-popular artist at a Music Hall in 1907. Note the punch line at the end of the chorus. Listen to the song and compare the style and beat with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer and Honey Pie.
Honey Pie also contains elements of big band and swing.
The term Granny Music was slightly ingenuous since Lennon himself also took influence from this genre in songs like For The Benefit of Mr Kite and You Know My Name.
And here’s a classic Beatles song that uses the British Music Hall genre as its major influence, Your Mother Should Know, which even explains the influence in the lyrics:
Let’s all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born.
The Beatles Influences
As we have seen, the Beatles' music was influenced by many genres. US rock &roll/blues was merely one of their many influences.
The influence of traditional British music, particularly music hall and folk, was far more fundamental to the Beatles' songs than is often realised as was British and European religious music, especially when you consider two of their greatest songs, Hey Jude and Let It Be.
Several classical influences can also be heard in elements of the Beatles’ music too. We hear Bach’s style in the piccolo trumpet section on Penny Lane, the piano break on In My Life and the guitar on Blackbird.
Because from Abbey Road is based on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played backwards and A Day In The Life did not just use avant-garde techniques pioneered by Stockhausen and Cage but was also inspired by Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony №2.
We even hear influences from film scores such as the Eleanor Rigby string backing which appears to have been influenced by Bernard Hermann’s score for the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho and also Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
Piggies, which was mentioned earlier for its harpsichord, uses a classical baroque style.
Never before (or since) have any artists produced such a diverse canon of work and never before had any artist moulded together so many diverse genres into a unique body of work.
Music is owned by no one but belongs to everyone. All musicians use those artists who went before as the basis for their work. The Beatles had a wider net than anyone to base the most diverse set of astonishing songs the world has ever seen before or since.
SOURCES INCLUDE
The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music; https://www.britannica.com/art/Western-music; The Western Scales; Guitarhistoryfacts.com; http://www.craveguitars.co.uk/tag/gaetano-vinaccia/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_guitar; https://www.britannica.com/art/harmony-music; McCartney — A Life in Lyrics podcast; The Lyrics by Paul McCartney Penguin Random House, 2021; 12-bar blues in Beatles songs; https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/music/paul-mccartney-buddy-holly-iowa-tim-rice-john-lennon-b1136527.html; The Complete Guitarist by Richard Chapman, Dorling Kindersley, 1993 edition; Alan Pollack’s Notes on the Beatles. The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles by Dominic Pedler, Omnibus Press.
