Eleanor Rigby

• 1. Introduction

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  Eleanor Rigby is a 1966 song by the Beatles, and it arrived on the charts with none of the guitars, drums, or amplified roar the band had built its name on. In its place: eight strings, a minor key, and two characters nobody in a pop song had ever cared about before. A woman who dies alone. A priest whose sermons no one hears. When it hit number one in Australia, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, it had done so without a single Beatle playing an instrument. Who wrote it, exactly, became a question the band's two principal songwriters spent the rest of their lives arguing over. What inspired it, and how a name spotted on a shop front in Bristol ended up on gravestones and statues, is a story of accidents, collaborations, and one remarkable act of musical nerve.

• 2. A Name From a Shop Window

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  Paul McCartney first came up with the melody at his piano, and the character he imagined was not Eleanor Rigby at all. Donovan heard an early version played on guitar, where the protagonist was called Ola Na Tungee, and the lyrics carried references to drug use and Indian musical influence. McCartney's own first choice of name was Miss Daisy Hawkins. In a 1966 interview with Sunday Times journalist Hunter Davies, McCartney described how the opening lines arrived: "The first few bars just came to me. And I got this name in my head - 'Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.'" The name Father McCartney came to him next, but he worried listeners would think it referred to his own father. He consulted a telephone book and settled on McKenzie instead. The first name "Eleanor" came possibly from Eleanor Bron, the actress who appeared with the Beatles in their 1965 film Help! "Rigby" came from a shop in Bristol called Rigby and Evens Ltd. McCartney noticed it while visiting his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, during her run in a Bristol Old Vic production in January 1966. He recalled in 1984: "I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. 'Eleanor Rigby' sounded natural."

• 3. A Room at Kenwood

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  McCartney wrote the melody and the first verse on his own, then brought the unfinished song to the music room of John Lennon's home at Kenwood, where the other Beatles and Lennon's childhood friend Pete Shotton were gathered. George Harrison came up with the "Ah, look at all the lonely people" hook that opens and closes the song. Ringo Starr contributed the line about Father McKenzie "writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear" and suggested the detail of the priest darning his socks. Shotton pointed out that the name Father McCartney risked confusing listeners and should be changed. McCartney could not settle on an ending, and it was again Shotton who proposed that the two lonely characters come together too late: Father McKenzie officiating at Eleanor Rigby's own funeral. Lennon rejected the idea at the time. McCartney said nothing, used it, and later acknowledged Shotton's contribution. Lennon told music journalist Alan Smith in the early 1970s that he had written "about 70 per cent" of the lyrics. In a letter to Melody Maker, he revised that figure down to "around 50 per cent". By 1980 he recalled writing nearly everything but the first verse. Pete Shotton remembered Lennon's contribution as "virtually nil", and McCartney put it at "80-20 to me". Historiographer Erin Torkelson Weber concluded that only Lennon's post-1970 accounts contradicted the broader evidence that McCartney was the primary author, and that the song's critical reputation likely sharpened Lennon's desire to claim a larger share of it.

• 4. Eight Strings, No Beatles

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  George Martin's string arrangement for "Eleanor Rigby" drew directly from Bernard Herrmann's score for the 1960 film Psycho. Where McCartney's previous orchestral song, "Yesterday", was played legato, Martin wrote the new piece mainly in staccato chords, and McCartney was explicit that he did not want the strings to sound cloying. The octet was recorded on the 28th of April 1966 in Studio 2 at EMI Studios, comprising four violins, two violas, and two cellos; none of the Beatles played a single note. Engineer Geoff Emerick placed microphones unusually close to the instruments to get a rawer sound, which alarmed the string players, who kept shifting their chairs away from the microphones until Martin used the talk-back system and told them to stop. Martin recorded two versions, one with vibrato and one without; the version without vibrato was chosen. The final overdub, on the 6th of June, was McCartney adding the "Ah, look at all the lonely people" refrain over the closing chorus at Martin's request, with Martin noting it worked contrapuntally against the chorus melody. Lennon recalled in 1980: "The violin backing was Paul's idea. Jane Asher had turned him on to Vivaldi, and it was very good." Take 15 was selected as the master.

• 5. Number One and the Boycott

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  On the 5th of August 1966, "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine" were released simultaneously as a double A-side single and as tracks on Revolver. The Beatles had broken their own rule against releasing album tracks as UK singles, reportedly to prevent cover versions of "Eleanor Rigby" from dominating the chart. Harrison predicted "dozens" of artists would have hits with the song. The double A-side topped the Record Retailer chart for four weeks, becoming the band's eleventh number-one single on that chart. In the United States, the release landed during the controversy over Lennon's remark that the Beatles had become "more popular than Jesus Christ", which led to radio boycotts and public record-burning in the South. Capitol Records, wary of the religious imagery in "Eleanor Rigby", promoted "Yellow Submarine" as the primary side. As the boycotts eased midway through the band's final tour, disc jockeys began playing the other side; "Eleanor Rigby" entered the Billboard Hot 100 in late August and peaked at number 11. At the tour's first press conference, on the 11th of August, a reporter suggested that the priest's unheard sermons were a comment on religion's decline in society. McCartney replied that the song was simply about lonely people, one of whom happened to be a priest. The NME named it Single of the Year for 1966, and at the 9th Annual Grammy Awards in March 1967, it won Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male or Female, for McCartney.

• 6. The Grave in Woolton

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  In the 1980s, a headstone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby was found in the churchyard of St Peter's Parish Church in Woolton, Liverpool. The real Eleanor Rigby had died in 1939 at the age of 44, and close by stood another headstone bearing the name McKenzie. St Peter's was the church where Lennon had attended Sunday school as a boy, and where he and McCartney first met at the church fete in July 1957. McCartney said he had no memory of seeing the grave, attributing the coincidence to his subconscious. In 1990, McCartney donated to the Sunbeams Music Trust a historical document listing wages paid by Liverpool City Hospital; one employee listed was an Eleanor Rigby, who had worked as a scullery maid and had signed the document in 1911 at the age of 16. The document sold at auction in November 2008 for 115,000 pounds. McCartney commented: "Eleanor Rigby is a totally fictitious character that I made up... If someone wants to spend money buying a document to prove a fictitious character exists, that's fine with me." A digitised image of the Woolton headstone appeared in the 1995 music video for the Beatles' reunion track "Free as a Bird", and in 2017 the deeds for the grave were put up for auction alongside a Bible that once belonged to Rigby.

• 7. Literary Life After 1966

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  Poets, novelists, and academics found in "Eleanor Rigby" something that most pop songs did not offer. Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn were among those who praised the lyrics; Gunn compared the song to W.H. Auden's poem "Miss Gee". Literary critic Karl Miller included the lyrics in his 1968 anthology Writing in England Today. Novelist A.S. Byatt described the song as having the "minimalist perfection" of a Samuel Beckett story, and in a 1993 BBC Radio 3 talk she argued that the line "Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door" was not a reference to make-up but a suggestion that Rigby "is faceless, is nothing" once alone in her home. George Melly, writing in his 1970 book Revolt into Style, likened the song's treatment of Liverpool to James Joyce's treatment of Dublin in Dubliners. Sociologists began studying the lyrics from 1966 onward, treating the Beatles as spokesmen for their generation. In 2018, Colin Campbell, professor of sociology at the University of York, published a book-length analysis titled The Continuing Story of Eleanor Rigby. Not everyone agreed. Music critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, writing in the 1970s, dismissed the sociological readings as "rearing a mis-shapen skull", calling the song "sentimental, melodramatic and a blind alley". In 1982, Liverpudlian musician Tommy Steele donated the Eleanor Rigby statue on Stanley Street in Liverpool, its plaque carrying the dedication "All the Lonely People".

• 8. Cover Versions and Later Legacy

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  By the mid-2000s, over 200 artists had recorded their own versions of "Eleanor Rigby". Ray Charles released a single in 1968 that peaked at number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 36 in the UK; Lennon called it "fantastic". Aretha Franklin's version charted at number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1969. Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees said their 1969 song "Melody Fair" was influenced by the track, and Dan Peek of America wrote "Lonely People" in 1973 explicitly as an optimistic response to it. McCartney recorded a new version for his 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street, with Martin again writing the orchestration. In 2021, composer Cody Fry assembled recordings from 400 musicians into an orchestral cover that received a Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards. Rankings from major publications placed the song at number 19 on Mojo's list of the 100 Greatest Songs of All Time and at number 137 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002. Songwriter Jerry Leiber said after the song's release: "I don't think there's ever been a better song written." Pete Townshend of the Who, in a 1967 interview, called it "a very important musical move forward" and named the Beatles as "basically my main source of inspiration". Leonard Bernstein highlighted the string arrangement in his April 1967 television program Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution as evidence that 1960s pop deserved recognition as art.