The Most Important Beatles Song Is The Most Forgotten

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What would you say was the most significant and defining of all the Beatles songs? I don’t just mean your favourites but the song that really made them so special above all other recordings. There are so many classics to choose from. Please Please Me was their first big hit; A Hard Day’s Night defines their movie career, Help, Yesterday, and the title track of their legendary album, Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might be high on your list of considerations. What if the record I choose here was one many readers never even heard of? The song is My Bonnie by Tony Sheridan, featuring the Beat Boys, as they are called on the record label, though the then Fab Five were without Ringo, but with Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. My Bonnie was performed and recorded in Hamburg in 1961 during the Beatles tours there. It is a great piece of rock & roll. Sheridan starts with a basic folk ballad – an easy listening take on the traditional Scottish song, but suddenly the Beatles crash in and the song starts to rock as the new music of the youth drowns out the old style - the styles collide and bounce off one another as if locked in a life or death duel from which rock & roll inevitably wins. It is a major moment of rock and roll. The song created the Beatles when a Liverpool record shop worker called Brian Epstein found several excited customers asking for copies though none as yet existed in the UK. The requests got Epstein curious enough to check out the band everyone raved about and his management turned them into legends. Sadly, when released as a UK single as late as 1963, My Bonnie barely charted and became a rare Beatles flop but it remains a fine song in the early rock & roll canon, and in the history of the greatest boy band of them all. Arthur Chappell