776 The Beatles “Yesterday” 1965

“McCartney has been thinking lately about pre-rock standards’ heavy influence on the Beatles’ songwriting—he and Lennon were already in their teens before they first heard Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. ‘We grew up watching Fred Astaire films, and then it was kind of swept aside by rock & roll, but we still have that influence…we were influenced by rock & roll—blues to some extent—but also, without knowing it, the melodic element of the Beatles, and some of the structural elements, came from the backs of our brains, which was this old stuff that our parents had sung’” (Brian Hatt, Rolling Stone, 2012). 

The Beatles “Yesterday”