George Harrison and the Influence of American Popular Song

Abstract

George Harrison often recalled that he grew up listening to music by the great songwriters of Tin Pan Alley (ca. 1880–1953), prizing their longevity and sustained quality. Though all four Beatles identified with music from this era and two even recorded tributes to it, little has been written about Harrison’s covers of four American popular song classics: Cole Porter’s “True Love” (1976), Hoagy Carmichael’s “Baltimore Oriole” and “Hong Kong Blues” (1981), and Harold Arlen’s “Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea” (2002). This chapter argues that some of Harrison’s own songwriting predilections may be traced in part to influences from American popular song. Specifically, his penchant for using diminished chords, metrical shifts, lyrical irony, and complex harmonic progressions in his own songs can be also found to varying degrees in the four covers. After analyzing the form, lyrics, and musical structure in the four songs in their original incarnations, this chapter examines how Harrison alters or interprets them in his covers, often with drastically different musical results. The chapter concludes with an analysis of “Tears Of The World,” an original Harrison song from the late 1970s that displays salient harmonic and lyrical influences from the aforementioned composers.