subject: Learn Beatles Hey Jude Guitar Song [print this page] Hey Jude! One of the Beatles' most recognizable and spectacular songs. Really interesting things about the song and what was going on with the Beatles at the time. It was written by Paul in 1968, June of 1968 he said as he was driving down a country road and thinking about various things and so kind of composed in his head and what was going on at the time, they were just about to spend some time in the studio, they had been recording the white album around the time, an album called The Beatles. I just happened to have it handy here and an album that looked like this and our fab four guys including pictures of all of them I think came with this album, that's great.
There were pictures of everyone: John Lennon, George Harrison (I think that was him), Ringo Starr, and of course Paul McCartney. There were also cutouts included in the article -- not really cutouts, but a poster with the White album. (The cutouts came with Sergeant Pepper.) George Martin had recorded certain songs to be singles or albums, and almost never put those songs designated to be singles on albums.
Now, he hasn't been at-this was one of the biggest mistakes he made as he helped out with the Beatles career, but his philosophy on that was that he didn't want people paying twice for the same song. If they bought the single, they buy the album, you get different stuff. Now, there were definitely some exceptions to this, but nowadays, people don't buy singles or at least by the middle of the Beatles career nowadays, 4 years ago is what I'm really talking about now. By the middle of the Beatles' career, people were buying more albums than singles and not worried about picking up the album if they already had the single, they'd pick up the single to see if they like it and then pick up the album-
So the single was a small-but little record about this big, seven inches, 45 with a big hole in it, about an inch and a half hole, so anyway, Hey Jude was designated to be a single right around the same time as the white album was coming out. Now, the white album-again, it's officially called The Beatles, and again, if you look at that, you've seen the cover. But on the album, of course, great tunes! While my guitar gently weeps, let's see a few others. Dear Prudence, George wrote the song Piggies, this song about candy, Savoy Truffle-anyway, back to Hey Jude.
Paul decided that he would try to console Julian, John's five-year-old son. He wrote Hey Jude for Julian because John was going through a divorce with his first wife and Julian's mother, Cynthia. This was before he met Yoko Ono, but Paul composed this song to simply say, "It's okay, everything is going to be fine." He demonstrated the song for the band soon after, in late June, played and sang it for John -- which is a great way to show how they worked together, because Paul wasn't entirely sure about the lyrics he'd used. One lyric in particular bothered him, and he thought that it wasn't very good. That lyric was, "The movement you need is on your shoulder." He said he told John after he'd sung it that he would change it.
John looked at him and says, "It's the best line in the song. You've got to keep it, that's not going anywhere." And as Paul thought back, he thought, well, okay, he sees something in it, he's right. It's staying.
That's a really good example of a couple of great songwriters getting together and doing some cooperative writing. He and John got together, practiced a few times, Paul put together some harmonies and other things the song needed, and then they planned to record it. They began to work on it in August of 1968, toward the end, something like the 29th or 30th. George Martin decided that there should be strings on it and other "big stuff," with an orchestra and a lot of other people. They had tried to do this before, squeezing in an orchestra, and a lot of other people, when they recorded A Day in the Life at Abbey Road Studios, and it hadn't worked out. This just wasn't meant for something that elaborate.
Because of that, they took the whole project and went to another location, Soho Trident Studios, which had also been used by Jackie Lomax and James Taylor. They hired an orchestra, something like 40 people strong, with cellos, 20 pieces, violins, and then asked those people to stay put and sing at the end of Hey Jude, the "Nah, nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah" line. (Wrong key, but that's okay.)
And the classical musicians love this because it meant they got paid double for doing two different things, for playing their instrument and singing, being part of the choir. So that was a good deal. Everybody made out pretty well at the Hey Jude recording sessions.
A few other kind of interesting things, in the United States, the albums-the United States was not as much into singles and album separation because we were used to albums having a hit song, so if you-you wouldn't necessarily buy the singles, you buy the album to have everything, but Capitol Records released this album here a little bit later, actually I think it was 1970 when this came out called Hey Jude. Now, this album had a bunch of songs that had been singles that had not been on other albums because of the way Capitol released things back then. So we've got stuff like Paperback Rider from quite a bit earlier, Revolution from around the same time, but this was the electric version of Revolution that was the single and not the one that was on the white album, I Should Have Known Better that was of course from A Hard Day's Night, but got cut from the movie so it consequently got cut from the Hard Day's Night soundtrack that was released here, the red cover and the pictures of them.
Later songs were included, too, such as the Ballad of John and Yoko, and George's song, Old Brown Shoe. This item is highly prized by collectors and these days, but you can also take most of these songs up on Past Masters Volume 2, which is another great way to get all of the old Beatles tunes you're missing.
With the fade out at the end, this is one of the longer Beatles tunes available, probably second longest not counting Revolution. There is an anthem-like fade out at the end, where the Beatles are just singing and Paul just kind of improvises over things that haven't always mixed. There were other songs, too, like those by Donovan Leech, the English folk singer. At that time, he had a song called Atlantis that had something like that ending, so that Paul said to himself that he should try to do that, with a bigger ending. Paul thought that about a lot of songs because he had also heard P-towns; they had just made what I think was My Generation, and Paul thought that he had to beat P's "raunchy rock 'n roll song."
Helter Skelter, Paul's idea of topping everybody in raunchiness. Reasonably successful probably in that regard, but another example of Paul or everybody trying to top things was there was a song that was popular here in the United States at the same time called MacArthur Park written by Jimmy Web and sung by Richard Harris, I believe, a long song and actually up until that point, really the longest song that had been a hit on the radio.
So Hey Jude fades out, got a nice long fadeout and is one second longer than MacArthur Park. Accident? Probably not! At least according to Jimmy Web, now Jimmy Web wrote some great songs too, so we can't discount him, wrote Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix-particularly songs that were done by Glen Campbell back in the late 60s, phenomenal songs here in the United States, but-the end of the story on Hey Jude was that this has really become one of the most requested songs that people love to play and sing and it's very simple. The chord progression, it's very simple, chord one to chord five-I'm playing it in G here, the original key was E or F depending on which recording you hear. The final one came out in F by the way, but after chord one and five, it goes to a five, seven, D7, when I'm hearing G and then back to G and then finally to chord 4, the subdominant C.
So, very simple chord progression, but Paul put together again just a spectacular melody, little hymn like and stuff, but the context and everything that went with this was just all added up to be in a great tune. So Hey Jude has got to be high on everybody's iPod and playlist, request list, guitar lesson list, piano lesson list and playing the piano part to Hey Jude is actually very simple because all you need to do is play a chord and then play a base note, sounds something like this-
Those are chords I, vii, and V:vii in the key of F, but Hey Jude should definitely be on your playlist. Rotation, that's the word. If you were a radio station, you'd be playing Hey Jude every day -- and can, with a Hey Jude guitar lesson.
