Hey Jude
In May 1968, John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon separated due to his affair with artist Yoko Ono. The following month, Paul McCartney drove out to visit the Lennons' five-year-old son Julian Lennon at Kenwood, the family's home in Weybridge. Cynthia had been part of the Beatles' social circle since before the band's rise to fame in 1963. McCartney later said he found it "a bit much for them suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life". Cynthia Lennon recalled of McCartney's surprise visit: "I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare[...] On the journey down he composed 'Hey Jude' in the car." The song's original title was "Hey Jules", and it was intended to comfort Julian from the stress of his parents' separation. McCartney said, "I knew it was not going to be easy for him", and that he changed the name from "Jules" to "Jude" because I thought that sounded a bit better. According to music journalist Chris Hunt, in the weeks after writing the song, McCartney "test[ed] his latest composition on anyone too polite to refuse." He stopped at the village of Harrold in Bedfordshire and performed "Hey Jude" at a local pub. He also regaled members of the Bonzo Dog Band with the song while producing their single "I'm the Urban Spaceman". Ron Griffiths of the group the Iveys , soon to be known as Badfinger , recalled that on one of their first days in the studio, McCartney "gave us a full concert rendition of 'Hey Jude'." The intensity of Lennon and Ono's relationship made any songwriting collaboration between Lennon and McCartney impossible. In support of his friend nevertheless, McCartney let the couple stay at his house in St John's Wood, but amidst growing tensions, the couple soon moved out. McCartney presented "Hey Jude" to Lennon on the 26th of July, when he and Ono visited McCartney's home. McCartney assured him that he would "fix" the line "the movement you need is on your shoulder", reasoning that "it's a stupid expression; it sounds like a parrot." According to McCartney, Lennon replied: "You won't, you know. That's the best line in the song." McCartney retained the phrase. Although McCartney originally wrote "Hey Jude" for Julian, Lennon thought it had actually been written for him. In a 1980 interview, Lennon stated that he "always heard it as a song to me" and contended that, on one level, McCartney was giving his blessing to Lennon and Ono's relationship, while, on another, he was disappointed to be usurped as Lennon's friend and creative partner.
The Beatles first taped 25 takes of the song at EMI Studios in London over two nights, 29 and the 30th of July 1968, with George Martin as their producer. These dates served as rehearsals, however, since they planned to record the master track at Trident Studios to utilise their eight-track recording machine (EMI was still limited to four-tracks). The first two takes from the 29th of July, which author and critic Kenneth Womack describes as a "jovial" session, have been released on the 50th Anniversary box set of the White Album in 2018 and the Anthology 3 compilation in 1996, respectively. The 30th of July rehearsals were filmed for a short documentary titled Music!, which was produced by the National Music Council of Great Britain. This was the first time that the Beatles had permitted a camera crew to film them developing a song in the studio. The film shows only three of the Beatles performing "Hey Jude", as George Harrison remained in the studio control room, with Martin and EMI recording engineer Ken Scott. During the rehearsals that day, Harrison and McCartney had a heated disagreement over the lead guitar part for the song. Harrison's idea was to play a guitar phrase as a response to each line of the vocal, which did not fit with McCartney's conception of the song's arrangement, and he vetoed it. Author Simon Leng views this as indicative of how Harrison was increasingly allowed little room to develop ideas on McCartney compositions, whereas he was free to create empathetic guitar parts for Lennon's songs of the period. In a 1994 interview, McCartney said, "looking back on it, I think, Okay. Well, it was bossy, but it was ballsy of me, because I could have bowed to the pressure." Ron Richards, a record producer who worked with Martin at both Parlophone and Associated Independent Recording, said McCartney was "oblivious to anyone else's feelings in the studio", and that he was driven to making the best possible record, at almost any cost. The Beatles recorded the master track for "Hey Jude" at Trident, where McCartney and Harrison had each produced sessions for their Apple artists, on the 31st of July. Trident's founder, Norman Sheffield, recalled that Mal Evans, the Beatles' aide and former roadie, insisted that some marijuana plants he had brought be placed in the studio to make the place "soft", consistent with the band's wishes. Barry Sheffield served as recording engineer for the session. The line-up on the basic track was McCartney on piano and lead vocal, Lennon on acoustic guitar, Harrison on electric guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums. The Beatles recorded four takes of "Hey Jude", the first of which was selected as the master. With drums intended to be absent for the first two verses, McCartney began this take unaware that Starr had just left for a toilet break. Starr soon returned , "tiptoeing past my back rather quickly", in McCartney's recollection , and performed his cue perfectly.
"Hey Jude" begins with McCartney singing lead vocals and playing the piano. The patterns he plays are based on three chords: F, C and B (I, V and IV). The main chord progression is "flipped on its head", in Hertsgaard's words, for the coda, since the C chord is replaced by E. Everett comments that McCartney's melody over the verses borrows in part from John Ireland's 1907 liturgical piece Te Deum, as well as (with the first change to a B chord) suggesting the influence of the Drifters' 1960 hit "Save the Last Dance for Me". The second verse of the song adds accompaniment from acoustic guitar and tambourine. Tim Riley writes that, with the "restrained tom-tom and cymbal fill" that introduces the drum part, "the piano shifts downward to add a flat seventh to the tonic chord, making the downbeat of the bridge the point of arrival ('And any time you feel the )." At the end of each bridge, McCartney sings a brief phrase ("Na-na-na na ..."), supported by an electric guitar fill, before playing a piano fill that leads to the next verse. According to Riley, this vocal phrase serves to "reorient the harmony for the verse as the piano figure turns upside down into a vocal aside". Additional musical details, such as tambourine on the third verse and subtle harmonies accompanying the lead vocal, are added to sustain interest throughout the four-verse, two-bridge song. The verse-bridge structure persists for approximately three minutes, after which the band leads into a four-minute-long coda, consisting of nineteen rounds of the song's double plagal cadence. During this coda, the rest of the band, backed by an orchestra that also provides backing vocals, repeats the phrase "Na-na-na na" followed by the words "hey Jude" until the song gradually fades out. In his analysis of the composition, musicologist Alan Pollack comments on the unusual structure of "Hey Jude", in that it uses a "binary form that combines a fully developed, hymn-like song together with an extended, mantra-like jam on a simple chord progression." Riley considers that the coda's repeated chord sequence (I, VII, IV, I) "answers all the musical questions raised at the beginnings and ends of bridges", since "The flat seventh that posed dominant turns into bridges now has an entire chord built on it." This three-chord refrain allows McCartney "a bedding ... to leap about on vocally", so he ad-libs his vocal performance for the rest of the song. In Riley's estimation, the song "becomes a tour of Paul's vocal range: from the graceful inviting tones of the opening verse, through the mounting excitement of the song itself, to the surging raves of the coda".
A failed early promotional attempt for the single took place after the Beatles' all-night recording session on 7, the 8th of August 1968. With Apple Boutique having closed a week before, McCartney and Francie Schwartz painted Hey Jude/Revolution across its large, whitewashed shop windows. The words were mistaken for antisemitic graffiti (since Jude means "Jew" in German), leading to complaints from the local Jewish community, and the windows being smashed by a passer-by. Discussing the episode in The Beatles Anthology, McCartney explained that he had been motivated by the location , "Great opportunity. Baker Street, millions of buses going around..." , and added: "I had no idea it meant 'Jew', but if you look at footage of Nazi Germany, Juden Raus was written in whitewashed windows with a Star of David. I swear it never occurred to me." According to Barry Miles, McCartney caused further controversy in his comments to Alan Smith of the NME that month, when, in an interview designed to promote the single, he said: "Starvation in India doesn't worry me one bit, not one iota ... And it doesn't worry you, if you're honest. You just pose." The Beatles hired Michael Lindsay-Hogg to shoot promotional clips for "Hey Jude" and "Revolution", after he had previously directed the clips for "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" in 1966. For "Hey Jude", they settled on the idea of shooting with a live, albeit controlled, audience. In the clip, the Beatles are first seen by themselves, performing the initial chorus and verses, before the audience moves forward and joins them in singing the coda. The decision was made to hire an orchestra and for the vocals to be sung live, to circumvent the Musicians' Union's ban on miming on television, but otherwise the Beatles performed to a backing track. Lindsay-Hogg shot the clip at Twickenham Film Studios on the 4th of September 1968. Tony Bramwell, a friend of the Beatles, later described the set as "the piano, there; drums, there; and orchestra in two tiers at the back." The event marked Starr's return to the group, after McCartney's criticism of his drumming had led to him walking out during a session for the White Album track "Back in the U.S.S.R." Starr was absent for two weeks. The final edit was a combination of two different takes and included "introductions" to the song by David Frost (who introduced the Beatles as "the greatest tea-room orchestra in the world") and Cliff Richard, for their respective TV programmes. It first aired in the UK on Frost on Sunday on the 8th of September 1968, two weeks after Lennon and Ono had appeared on the show to promote their views on performance art and the avant-garde. The "Hey Jude" clip was broadcast in the United States on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on the 6th of October. According to Riley, the Frost on Sunday broadcast "kicked 'Hey Jude' into the stratosphere" in terms of popularity. Norman comments that it evoked "palpable general relief" for viewers who had watched Frost's show two weeks before, as Lennon now adopted a
supporting role to McCartney, and Ono was "nowhere in sight". Hertsgaard pairs the band's performance with the release of the animated film Yellow Submarine as two events that created "a state of nirvana" for Beatles fans, in contrast with the problems besetting the band regarding Ono's influence and Apple. Referring to the sight of the Beatles engulfed by a crowd made up of "young, old, male, female, black, brown, and white" fans, Hertsgaard describes the promotional clip as "a quintessential sixties moment, a touching tableau of contentment and togetherness." The 4th of September 1968 promo clip is included in the Beatles' 2015 video compilation 1, while the three-disc versions of that compilation, titled 1+, also include an alternate video, with a different introduction and vocal, from the same date.
In his contemporary review of the single, Derek Johnson of NME wrote: "The intriguing features of 'Hey Jude' are its extreme length and the 40-piece orchestral accompaniment , and personally I would have preferred it without either!" While he viewed the track overall as "a beautiful, compelling song", and the first three minutes as "absolutely sensational", Johnson rued the long coda's "vocal improvisations on the basically repetitive four-bar chorus". Johnson nevertheless concluded that "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" "prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Beatles are still streets ahead of their rivals". Chris Welch of Melody Maker said he had initially been unimpressed, but came to greatly admire "Hey Jude" for its "slow, heavy, piano-ridden beat, sensuous, soulful vocals and nice thumpy drums". He added that the track would have benefited from being edited in length, as the climactic ending was "a couple of minutes too long". Cash Boxs reviewer said that the extended fadeout, having been a device pioneered by the Beatles on "All You Need Is Love", "becomes something of an art form" in "Hey Jude", comprising a "trance-like ceremonial that becomes almost timeless in its continuity". Time magazine described it as "a fadeout that engagingly spoofs the fadeout as a gimmick for ending pop records". The reviewer contrasted "Hey Jude" with "Revolution", saying that McCartney's song "urges activism of a different sort" by "liltingly exhort[ing] a friend to overcome his fears and commit himself in love". Catherine Manfredi of Rolling Stone also read the lyrics as a message from McCartney to Lennon to end his negative relationships with women: "to break the old pattern; to really go through with love." Manfredi commented on the duality of the song's eponymous protagonist as a representation of good, in Saint Jude, "the Patron of that which is called Impossible", and of evil, in Judas Iscariot. Other commentators interpreted "Hey Jude" as being directed at Bob Dylan, then semi-retired in Woodstock. Writing in 1971, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it "one of [McCartney's] truest and most forthright love songs" and said that McCartney's romantic side was ill-served by the inclusion of I Will', a piece of fluff" on The Beatles. In their 1975 book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote that "Hey Jude" "promised great things" for the ill-conceived Apple enterprise and described the song as "the last great Beatles single recorded specifically for the 45s market". They commented also that "the epic proportions of the piece" encouraged many imitators, yet these other artists "[failed] to capture the gentleness and sympathy of the Beatles' communal feel". Walter Everett admires the melody as a "marvel of construction, contrasting wide leaps with stepwise motions, sustained tones with rapid movement, syllabic with melismatic word-setting, and tension ... with resolution". He cites Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks", Donovan's "Atlantis", the Moody Blues' "Never Comes the Day" and the Allman Brothers' "Revival" among the many songs with "mantralike repeated sections" that followed the release of "Hey Jude". In his entry for the song in his 1993 book Rock and Roll:
The 100 Best Singles, Paul Williams describes it as a "song about breathing". He adds: Hey Jude' kicks ass like Van Gogh or Beethoven in their prime. It is, let's say, one of the wonders of this corner of creation ... It opens out like the sky at night or the idea of the existence of God." Alan Pollack highlights the song as "such a good illustration of two compositional lessons , how to fill a large canvas with simple means, and how to use diverse elements such as harmony, bassline, and orchestration to articulate form and contrast." Pollack says that the long coda provides "an astonishingly transcendental effect", while AllMusic's Richie Unterberger similarly opines: "What could have very easily been boring is instead hypnotic because McCartney varies the vocal with some of the greatest nonsense scatting ever heard in rock, ranging from mantra-like chants to soulful lines to James Brown power screams." In his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald wrote that the "pseudo-soul shrieking in the fade-out may be a blemish" but he praised the song as "a pop/rock hybrid drawing on the best of both idioms". MacDonald concluded: Hey Jude' strikes a universal note, touching on an archetypal moment in male sexual psychology with a gentle wisdom one might properly call inspired." Lennon said the song was "one of [McCartney's] masterpieces".
In his 1996 article about the single's release, for Mojo, Paul Du Noyer said that the writing of "Hey Jude" had become "one of the best-known stories in Beatles folklore". In a 2005 interview, Ono said that for McCartney and for Julian and Cynthia Lennon, the scenario was akin to a drama, in that "Each person has something to be totally miserable about, because of the way they were put into this play. I have incredible sympathy for each of them." Du Noyer quoted Cynthia Lennon as saying of "Hey Jude", "it always bring tears to my eyes, that song." Julian discovered that "Hey Jude" had been written for him almost 20 years after the fact. He recalled of his and McCartney's relationship: "Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit , more than Dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seems to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and my dad." In 1996, Julian paid £38,000 for the recording notes to "Hey Jude" at an auction. He spent a further £47,000 at the auction, buying John Lennon memorabilia. John Cousins, Julian Lennon's manager, stated at the time: "He has a few photographs of his father, but not very much else. He is collecting for personal reasons; these are family heirlooms if you like." In 2002, the original handwritten lyrics for the song were nearly auctioned off at Christie's in London. The sheet of notepaper with the scrawled lyrics had been expected to fetch up to £500,000 at the auction, which was scheduled for the 30th of April 2002. McCartney went to court to stop the auction, claiming the paper had disappeared from his West London home. Richard Morgan, representing Christie's, said McCartney had provided no evidence that he had ever owned the piece of paper on which the lyrics were written. The courts decided in McCartney's favour and prohibited the sale of the lyrics. They had been sent to Christie's for auction by Frenchman Florrent Tessier, who said he purchased the piece of paper at a street market stall in London for £1,000 in the early 1970s. In the original catalogue for the auction, Julian Lennon had written, "It's very strange to think that someone has written a song about you. It still touches me." Along with "Yesterday", "Hey Jude" was one of the songs that McCartney has highlighted when attempting to have some of the official Beatles songwriting credits changed to McCartney, Lennon. McCartney applied the revised credit to this and 18 other Lennon, McCartney songs on his 2002 live album Back in the U.S., attracting criticism from Ono, as Lennon's widow, and from Starr, the only other surviving member of the Beatles. In April 2020, the handwritten lyrics used during the original recording sold for $910,000 at auction via Julien's Auctions.
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Common questions
Why did Paul McCartney write Hey Jude for Julian Lennon?
Paul McCartney wrote Hey Jude to comfort five-year-old Julian Lennon during the separation of his parents John and Cynthia in May 1968. The song was originally titled Hey Jules before McCartney changed it to sound better.
When were the Beatles recorded playing Hey Jude at Trident Studios?
The Beatles recorded the master track for Hey Jude at Trident Studios on the 31st of July 1968. They had previously taped 25 takes at EMI Studios over two nights, the 29th and the 30th of July 1968.
What happened when the Beatles painted Hey Jude on Apple Boutique windows?
McCartney and Francie Schwartz painted Hey Jude Revolution across the shop windows on the 7th or the 8th of August 1968 after the boutique closed. The words were mistaken for antisemitic graffiti because Jude means Jew in German, leading to complaints from the local Jewish community and the windows being smashed by a passer-by.
How long is the coda section of Hey Jude compared to the rest of the song?
The verse-bridge structure persists for approximately three minutes before the band leads into a four-minute-long coda. This extended ending consists of nineteen rounds of the song's double plagal cadence with an orchestra providing backing vocals.
Who directed the promotional clip for Hey Jude filmed at Twickenham Film Studios?
Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed the promotional clip for Hey Jude which was shot at Twickenham Film Studios on the 4th of September 1968. The final edit included introductions by David Frost and Cliff Richard for their respective TV programmes.