Don't Pass Me By

• 1. Introduction

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  "Don't Pass Me By" took six years to get from Ringo Starr's piano to a recording studio. Starr first played the song for the other Beatles not long after he joined the group in August 1962, but it would sit unrecorded for the better part of a decade. When it finally appeared on the 1968 double album The Beatles, better known as the White Album, it carried a distinction no other track on that record could claim: it was the first solo composition ever written by the drummer. How does a song written by the quiet Beatle spend years in limbo before finally making it onto one of the most celebrated albums in rock history? And what happens when a song that sounds like country-and-western ends up on a rock record with no guitars at all?

• 2. Ringo Writes a Song

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  Starr described writing the song with characteristic modesty. "I was sitting round at home," he said. "I was fiddling with the piano. I just bang away, and then if a melody comes and some words, I just have to keep going." The song's earliest public appearance came not in a studio but on a BBC radio programme. During a chatter session introducing "And I Love Her" on the show Top Gear in 1964, Starr was asked whether he had written a song. Paul McCartney immediately mocked him, singing the first line of the refrain: "Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue, baby." That moment of gentle ribbing turned out to be the song's first documented public mention, and it would be another four years before the track was actually recorded.

• 3. A Song With Three Names

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  Recording took place across four separate sessions in 1968: on the 5th and the 6th of June, and on the 12th and the 22nd of July. Despite being discussed publicly under its eventual title as far back as 1964, the song arrived in the studio wearing different names. The tape label from the 5th of June session identified it as "Ringo's Tune (Untitled)", while the label from the 6th of June called it "This Is Some Friendly". By the 12th of July session, the original title had been restored. On the 6th of June lead vocal take, Starr audibly counted out eight beats; that count survived into the finished record and can be heard at 2:30 of the 1987 CD version. The monaural mix also differs from the stereo mix, running faster and featuring a different arrangement of the violin in the fade-out.

• 4. The Rejected Introduction

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  George Martin composed an orchestral piece intended as an introduction to the song, but the Beatles rejected it. That music did not disappear. It was repurposed as an incidental cue in the animated film Yellow Submarine, where it plays right before "Eleanor Rigby". The piece eventually reached listeners under its own title: "A Beginning" appeared on Anthology 3 in 1996. Its path to that anthology was circuitous. Anthology 3 had originally been planned around a new Beatles recording, "Now and Then", intended to fill the same role that "Free as a Bird" had on Anthology 1 and "Real Love" on Anthology 2. When "Now and Then" was abandoned, "A Beginning" took its place. The orchestra that recorded it on the 22nd of July 1968 was the same ensemble that appeared on the Beatles' song "Good Night", and the piece required twelve violins, three violas, harp, three flutes, clarinets, horn, vibraphone, and bass.

• 5. The Band's Favourite

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  At the start of the Beatles' filmed rehearsals at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969, George Harrison brought a piece of news back from a visit to Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock, in upstate New York. He told Starr and McCartney that "Don't Pass Me By" was the Band's favourite track on the White Album. The song's country mood was, Harrison said, "their scene completely", and he told Starr directly: "You'd go down a bomb with them." The endorsement from one of the most respected groups in American roots music spoke to something the song's critics also noticed. A reviewer for International Times, Barry Miles, called it "Ringo's C&W number" and praised the "excellent fiddle player" and the "bag-pipe effect". Nik Cohn, writing in The New York Times, described it as "the Beatles five years back, straight ahead and clumsy and greatly enjoyable, backed by a beautiful hurdy-gurdy organ and made perfect by Ringo's own vocal, sleepwalking as ever".

• 6. Guitarless and Debated

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  The personnel list for the song is notable for what it leaves out. Ringo Starr played double-tracked vocals, drums, tack piano, sleigh bells, cowbell, maracas, and congas. Paul McCartney played grand piano and bass guitar. Jack Fallon played violin. The pianos were both recorded into a Leslie 147 speaker. There was no guitar. Record Mirror found the track had a "carnival atmosphere" and a "'gay Paree' sound", calling it "very appealing" with Starr's vocal. But the same publication's David Griffiths, writing in January 1969, said the arrangement had "quickly palled" on him and that he tended to "jump the needle" past the track. Writing in 2014, Ian Fortnam of Classic Rock magazine placed the song in distinguished company, citing it as one of four White Album tracks containing "every one of rock's key ingredients", alongside "Yer Blues", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and "Helter Skelter". He also argued that the song was poorly served by McCartney's arrangement and that later artists would get closer to what it was really after.

• 7. Cover Versions and Legacy

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  The Georgia Satellites recorded "Don't Pass Me By" on their 1988 album Open All Night, and Fortnam singled out their version as the one that finally captured the "full boogie-rocking potential" the original arrangement had left untapped. Phish gave the song a bluegrass treatment, releasing their live interpretation on Live Phish Volume 13. The alt-country band the Gourds and the Punkles, on their 2004 album Pistol, also recorded versions. Starr himself returned to the song on his 2017 album Give More Love, releasing a new recording as a bonus track. The song had meanwhile reached Scandinavia as a single, misattributed to Lennon-McCartney, and peaked at number one in Denmark in April 1969. That chart success came nearly seven years after Starr first played the song for his bandmates, a timeline that says something about how long an idea can wait before it finally finds its moment.