Yesterday

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Yesterday (disambiguation) .

Yesterday
The Beatles
publication	September 13, 1965
length	2 min 6 s
Genre (s)	Pop , ballad
Author (s)	Lennon / McCartney
album	Help!

Yesterday ( German "Yesterday") is the title of one of Paul McCartney -penned songs, which by the Beatles in 1965 on the album Help! has been published. Yesterday , which was released as a single outside of Great Britain , developed into the most covered pop song of all time.

History of origin

Chart positions Explanation of the data

Singles

Yesterday   DE 6th 11/15/1965 (12 weeks)   AT 10 December 15, 1965 (4 weeks)   US 1 09/25/1965 (11 weeks) Yesterday [1976]   UK 8th 03/13/1976 (9 weeks)

Paul McCartney came up with the basic tune while staying overnight at the house of his then girlfriend Jane Asher in London . Believing that he knew the tune and wanted to avoid cryptomnesia , he spent a month asking people in the music industry and his band members if they knew the tune. Since no one knew the melody, McCartney pushed the composition forward. Music producer George Martin heard the song for the first time during the Beatles' France tour between January 14, 1964 and February 4, 1964, played by Paul McCartney on the piano under the working title Scrambled Eggs ('scrambled eggs') in the Paris hotel "George V" . The rough text was written during the France tour in 1964, the textual breakthrough only came during a trip to Portugal on May 27, 1965.

George Martin suggested string accompaniment, but Paul McCartney declined a string vibrato . The instrumental line- up , which is unusual for a pop song, consisted of Francisco Gabarro (cello), Tony Gilbert / Sidney Sax (violin) and Kenneth Essex (viola); Paul McCartney sings and accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar ( Epiphone FT-79, "Texan"), using only his thumb and forefinger. The cello accompanied Paul McCartney's solo part and gave the piece the impression of chamber music . It was the first recording without the entire band . On June 14, 1965, Paul McCartney's vocals and guitar accompaniment were recorded in two takes in Abbey Road Studios (Studio 2) , with Take 2 as the basis for the recordings on June 17, 1965. On that day the string quartet was overdubbed and the final mix was done . The string-accompanied ballad should set a trend.

Music and lyrics

Formally, it is a reprise format , made up of a seven -bar tunnel (a), an eight-bar swan song (b) and a two-bar coda (c) as an echo repetition of the tunnel end: aabac. The tunnel consists of a short one-bar opening motif from which a two-bar melody curve develops, which is reversed in the following two bars and leads to a new motif . The tones of bar 2/3 of the Stollen (defed) and bar 3/3 of the swan song match.

The strings - Arrangement came from the former Beatles producer George Martin. Yesterday is ² / ₄ written ¯ clock. The key is F major , even though McCartney tuned his guitar two semitones down so he could use the chord fingerings for G major .

The melancholy ballad is about a relationship that has ended. The protagonist has chosen wrong words (“said something wrong”), whereupon the partner leaves him and he longs for the past (“long for yesterday”). The title Yesterday stands less for “yesterday”, but as a synonym for the past.

Publication and Success

Beatles - Yesterday ( US single)

The rest of the Beatles voted against releasing it as a single in Great Britain , so that Yesterday was only part of the album Help! appeared. Although Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday alone, Lennon / McCartney were named as the usual authors. On August 8, 1965, Yesterday was presented live on the British television show Blackpool Night Out (ABC Theater, Blackpool). Outside the UK, the single Yesterday / Act Naturally was released , so in the US on September 13, 1965, where it was number 1 on the Billboard charts for four weeks. Three weeks after publication, a gold record was awarded in the USA on October 2, 1965 , because Yesterday sold 1.8 million copies there in the first year after publication, 2.5 million worldwide. In Germany, Yesterday was performed live three times during the BRAVO Beatles blitz tour , namely on June 24th ( Kronebau , Munich), June 25th ( Grugahalle , Essen) and on June 26th, 1966 in the Ernst-Merck-Halle , Hamburg . In Germany, the single climbed to number 6 in November 1965. It also became a number one hit in Belgium , Spain , Norway , Finland and Hong Kong. On March 4, 1966, Yesterday appeared on the EP of the same name in Great Britain, which stayed at number 1 for two months. It was not until March 1976 that the single was released in Great Britain and reached number 8 in the single charts (with the B-side I Should Have Known Better ). The BMI assumes that the piece is the most frequently performed pop song with over seven million performances worldwide.

Yesterday was named the best pop song since 1963 by music broadcaster MTV and Rolling Stone magazine . On the Rolling Stone- list of 500 greatest songs of all time occupied Yesterday 13th place In the radio it is considered the year most played song.

Cover versions

Gold record for the RIAA's Yesterday

By January 1, 1986, there were already around 1,600 cover versions , the number of which has now increased to over 3,000. This makes Yesterday the most covered pop song. From the large number of versions, those by Matt Monro (October 1965; 8th place), Marianne Faithfull (October 1965), Cilla Black (January 1966), Ray Charles with a soul version (November 1967; Rhythm & Blues hit parade 8th place, Pop hit parade number 25), Gladys Knight (December 1968), Frank Sinatra (March 1969), Marvin Gaye (January 1970), Elvis Presley (June 1970), Dionne Warwick (December 1970), Wings (December 1976), Billie Jo Spears (October 1978), Paul McCartney (October 1984), LeAnn Rimes (July 1994), an a cappella -version of Boyz II Men (August 1994) or Neil Diamond (November 2010).

Knut Kiesewetter published a German version of the song with the title Gestern noch in 1965 at Polydor .

Allegations of plagiarism

From July 2003, allegations of plagiarism came up from various quarters. At first, the trade press stumbled upon textual similarities in the rhyme structure to David Whitfield's Answer Me (October 1953) and the hit version of Nat King Cole (February 1954; 6th place). McCartney denied any resemblance between the pieces. In July 2006 the Italian composer Lilli Greco claimed that the melody from the Neapolitan folk song Piccere 'Che Vene a Dicere (' I look you in the eye, little one ') was written in 1895; however, nobody could prove the existence of the song as a record or in sheet music.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chart sources: Germany - Austria - Great Britain - USA
2. ↑ Steve Turner: A Hard Day's Write: The Story Behind Every Beatles Song . 2005, p. 83
3. ^ Mark Lewisohn: The Beatles Recording Sessions . 1988, p. 59
4. ↑ Werner Faulstich: Rock, Pop, Beat, Folk: Basics d. Text music analysis . Gunter Narr Verlag, 1978, ISBN 978-3-87808-927-8 ( google.de [accessed July 8, 2020]).
5. ^ Joseph Murrells, Million Selling Records , 1985, p. 203
6. ↑ Most Recorded Song . ( Memento from September 10, 2006 on the Internet Archive ) Guinness World Records
7. ↑ Catalog # 696 . Heritage Auctions Inc., 2008, p. 242
8. ↑ Knut Kiesewetter: “Yesterday still” . ( Memento from June 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Süddeutsche Zeitung
9. ↑ Yesterday begins with the lines: "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they're here to stay".
   Answer Me begins with: "Yesterday, I believed that love was here to stay, won't you tell me where I've gone astray"
10. ↑ King Cole 'influenced' Beatles hit . BBC News . July 7, 2003. Retrieved December 30, 2010.
11. ↑ The Unknown Song . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 2006, p. 69 ( online ).
12. ↑ Max Cryer: Love Me Tender: The Stories Behind The World's Favorite Songs . 2010, p. 84 f.