From Me to You

• 1. Introduction

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  From Me to You is a 1963 song by the Beatles, and Paul McCartney once said a milkman proved it had caught on. He was lying in bed one morning when he heard a man whistling the tune outside. That was the first time he thought the band had really made it. He added that he was sure a bird had whistled it to him once as well. The song was the group's third single, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. At home it gave the Beatles their first number one on what became the official British singles chart. Abroad, the story was stranger. In America the original was ignored at first, and someone else's recording reached the charts before it did. How did two young songwriters build the song? What made its melody unusual? And how did a failure in one country turn into a double-sided hit the following year?

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• 2. Written on a Coach

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  The coach was bound for Shrewsbury when Lennon and McCartney began writing, during a tour the Beatles shared with Helen Shapiro. They had been reading the New Musical Express, whose letters section was called "From You to Us". That name flipped around to become the song's title. McCartney later explained that their early songs kept using the words I, me or you. The habit made each song feel "very direct and personal" to the band's fans.

  Lennon remembered the session in a 1980 interview with Playboy. He was certain the first line was his, and the pair built the rest together from there. He also said the song was far bluesier when they first wrote it. Before that interview, he had said the band nearly decided against recording it for exactly that reason. The worry faded once George Martin scored it with a harmonica.

  Singer-songwriter Roger Greenaway told a story from the same journey. Kenny Lynch, who fancied himself a songwriter, wandered to the back of the coach to offer help. Half an hour went by with nothing to show for it. Lynch rushed to the front and announced, in blunt language, that he was done helping because the pair did not know music.

  The Beatles saw it differently. They judged the song catchy and fresh enough to release as a single. McCartney called it "very much co-written", and it counts as one of the songs the pair truly wrote together. He would later single out one stretch of it as a turning point in his own writing.

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• 3. The Surprising Middle

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  Each verse of the song lasts only eight measures, all of them in C major. The bridge then moves to F major, the subdominant key. That move from home key to subdominant is almost a cliché in pop music. Lennon and McCartney sidestep it by taking a different route between the two chords than the standard one. At the bridge's climax, the chord changes carry a shout of "woo!". The bridge ends on an augmented G chord, which pulls the song back home to C major.

  The full layout runs intro, two verses, a bridge, two more verses, a second bridge, a final verse and a coda. The first half of the fourth verse is instrumental. The second half of every verse works as a mini-refrain, and both bridges share identical lyrics. In the words, a singer offers his love to someone and tells her he has "everything that you want".

  McCartney said he liked the song for its very complete middle, which went to a surprising place. In his view, the opening chord of that section signalled a new batch of songs for him. His verdict was blunt: "That was a pivotal song."

  The opening lick, the "da da da da da dum dum da" part, came from George Martin, who suggested the band sing it. They found the idea unusual but trusted him. EMI producer Ron Richards later said it made the Beatles aware of George's "enormous musical sense". Martin himself had a very simple account of how the song reached his studio.

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• 4. Studio and Summit

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  George Martin said he had asked the band for another song as good as Please Please Me, and they brought him this one. "There seemed to be a bottomless well of songs," he recalled. On the 5th of March 1963, the Beatles recorded it at EMI Studios in six takes, with seven edit pieces, and nothing went wrong. Lennon sang and played rhythm guitar and harmonica, McCartney sang and played bass, George Harrison played lead guitar and Ringo Starr played drums.

  On the 11th of April, Parlophone released the single in the UK with Thank You Girl on the B-side, under catalogue number R5015. Nine days later it began a twenty-one week run in the British charts. It reached number one on the 4th of May and stayed there for seven weeks.

  It knocked Gerry and the Pacemakers off the top with How Do You Do It. That song had been offered to the Beatles, who even recorded it, though it stayed officially unreleased until 1995. They turned it down in favour of Please Please Me. Gerry and the Pacemakers, also from Liverpool, were early rivals. They reached number one before the Beatles did, and claimed their second and third chart-toppers first too. Their momentum faded as Beatlemania took hold and the Beatles dominated music worldwide in 1964.

  Lennon's harmonica part followed a Jimmy Reed-inspired blues style that he had learned from Delbert McClinton, an American who shared a bill with the Beatles in the early Sixties. "It's chiseled in stone now that I taught Lennon how to play harmonica," McClinton said. He remembered Lennon asking him to show him something.

  This was the first Beatles song to reach number one in the UK, and it is widely seen as their first chart-topper. Please Please Me had topped almost every chart but sat at number two on Record Retailers, generally considered the most authoritative list of the time. It began a streak of eleven consecutive British number one singles.

  Overseas, the 1963-64 charts placed it first in New Zealand and first in South Africa. It reached fifth on both Swedish lists, eighth in Italy, ninth on Australia's Kent Music Report and eighteenth in Denmark. Year-end tables for 1963 ranked it first in South Africa and second in Britain.

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• 5. Del Shannon's Cover

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  On the 18th of April 1963, the Beatles were one of 15 acts at Swinging Sound '63, an all-star concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. They played From Me to You and Twist and Shout. Del Shannon was on the same bill. Afterwards he told Lennon he planned to record the song because he liked its falsetto parts.

  Lennon was flattered at first. He soon changed his mind, realizing that a Shannon version could damage the Beatles' chances of a hit in the United States. As it turned out, he was only temporarily right, and neither version became a big American hit.

  In early June, Bigtop Records released Shannon's recording as the follow-up to his song Two Kinds of Teardrops. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the 29th of June, making it the first Lennon and McCartney composition to appear on the American charts. It stayed four weeks and peaked at number 77. It reached 67 on the Cash Box Top 100 and 15 on the WLS Silver Dollar Survey in Chicago. In Canada it reached 13 on the CHUM Hit Parade, and in Australia it reached 21.

  Shannon's recording follows the Beatles' original almost note for note. The differences are a slightly faster tempo and a fade-out ending. He later explained his choice: "At that time no one had heard of the Beatles here (the US), but I knew they were great writers so I just picked up on one of their songs." Meanwhile, the label holding the Beatles' own American rights was preparing a response.

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• 6. Radio Rescue in Los Angeles

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  Vee-Jay Records had signed a licensing deal giving it the right of first refusal on Beatles records for five years. That arrangement came with Please Please Me. Even after that single flopped, Vee-Jay chose to release From Me to You. The result was that Capitol Records never turned the song down, because it was never offered to them.

  Vee-Jay issued it as Vee-Jay 522 on the 27th of May 1963, with Thank You Girl on the B-side. Cash Box magazine named it a "Pick of the Week". Even so, it sold fewer than 4,000 copies through the end of June and charted nowhere. When Del Shannon's version arrived, Vee-Jay ran magazine ads and mailed extra promotional copies stamped "The Original Hit".

  The real lift came from disc jockey Dick Biondi, who had played Please Please Me on WLS in Chicago. WLS fired him in May, and in June he moved to KRLA 1110 in Los Angeles. He persuaded his new station to add the song to its playlist. It entered the station's "Tune-Dex" on the 14th of July and spent six weeks on the chart. It peaked at number 32 on the 11th of August.

  That airplay pushed the single onto Billboard's Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart for three weeks. It peaked at number 116 on the 10th of August, the first time the Beatles appeared on a national Billboard chart. The original edition sold around 22,000 copies, roughly three times what Please Please Me had managed. It was still a modest figure beside what came next.

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• 7. A Second Chance

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  On the 3rd of January 1964, Vee-Jay reissued the record, this time paired with Please Please Me. The timing followed film of the Beatles appearing on The Jack Paar Program, the NBC prime-time version of Paar's earlier Tonight Show. The song entered the Billboard chart on the 7th of March. It peaked at number 41 in the United States and at number 6 in Canada. The double-sided single sold approximately 1.1 million copies in 1964.

  By then, Vee-Jay's earlier choices looked costly. Had the company known how all-encompassing Beatlemania would become, it would likely have saved From Me to You for an A-side. It did exactly that later with Twist and Shout and Do You Want to Know a Secret.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In the Beatles film Help!, an instrumental arrangement by Ken Thorne called From Me to You Fantasy plays during scenes in which people try to pull a ring from Ringo's finger while he sleeps in the band's shared apartment. It is track 3 on the original American soundtrack album.

  The song's album history came late. Its first album appearance anywhere was on the Canadian Twist and Shout LP in 1964. That same year it made its American album debut on Vee-Jay's Jolly What! England's Greatest Recording Stars: The Beatles and Frank Ifield on Stage. It reached a regular American Beatles album only in 1973, on the double LP compilation 1962-1966. British listeners first got it on an album in 1966, on A Collection of Beatles Oldies. The first CD release came in 1988 on Past Masters, and later on the 1962-1966 double CD and the single-disc compilation 1.

  Two mixes exist. The mono version, issued as the 1963 single, appears on the 1988 Past Masters, the 1962-1966 CD reissues, the 2000 release 1, and the 2009 Mono Masters. The stereo version appears on A Collection of Beatles Oldies, the original 1973 LP issues of 1962-1966, and the 2009 reissue of Past Masters. Its intro was recorded on two tracks and lacks the harmonica that was added in the mono mix.

  Bobby McFerrin covered the song on his 1986 album Spontaneous Inventions. In November 2008, a slowed-down version with only piano and vocals became the first Beatles song used in a British advertising campaign, for John Lewis' Christmas marketing. On the 4th of March 2016, Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP released a remix. That same year, the American indie rock band Futurebirds put the song on its EP Portico I.

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