Yer Blues

Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“Yer Blues” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, from their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as “the White Album”). Though credited to Lennon–McCartney, the song was written and composed by John Lennon during the Beatles’ retreat in Rishikesh, India. The song is a parody of blues music, specifically English imitators of blues.

Composition

Lennon said that, while “trying to reach God and feeling suicidal” in India, he wanted to write a blues song, but was unsure if he could imitate the likes of Sleepy John Estes and other original blues artists he had listened to in school. In “Yer Blues,” he alludes to this insecurity with a reference to the character Mr. Jones from Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and with the third verse, which draws on Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail.” Instead, Lennon wrote and composed “Yer Blues” as a parody of British imitators of the blues, featuring tongue-in-cheek guitar solos and rock and roll-inspired swing blues passages.

The half-satirical, half-earnest song mockingly acknowledges the British blues boom of 1968 and the debate among the music press at the time of whether white men could sing the blues. According to Walter Everett, the song’s “ponderous earnestness … bellies the composer’s satirical tone.” In the chorus, Lennon sings, “If I ain’t dead already, girl you know the reason why.” The writer Jonathan Gould interprets this to be a “joke [in] that nobody knows the reason why—or, for that matter, what any of these bluesy poetics are really supposed to mean.” Gould called “Yer Blues” an example of the “cultural realism” that distinguished the Beatles from their musical contemporaries in Britain: “[T]heir acceptance of the idea that, except as a subject of self-parody, certain expressive modes of African-American music lay outside the realm of their experience and hence beyond their emotional range as singers.”

Recording

“Yer Blues” was recorded in EMI Studio Two’s “annexe,” which was actually a large closet in the control room. In 2016, Paul McCartney recalled, “We were talking about this tightness, this packed-in-a-tin thing. So we got in a little cupboard – a closet that had microphone leads and things, with a drum kit, amps turned to the walls, one mic for John. We did ‘Yer Blues’ live and it was really good.” The song is in the key of E major, but like many blues numbers, it prominently features accidentals, such as G♮, D♮, and B♭. It is primarily in a 68 meter, but as with several of Lennon’s tunes, the time signature and tempo are altered many times. In interviews for The Beatles Anthology series, Ringo Starr affectionately recalls recording this song in the stripped-down conditions, saying it was like the old days of live performances by the Beatles. The stripped-down, bluesy nature of the number bears similarity to much of Lennon’s early solo output, including “Cold Turkey” and his 1970 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album and marks a retreat from the concerns that Lennon had with such studio experimentation as had marked such songs as “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The track, along with “Glass Onion“, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps“, “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Sun King“, is one of few Beatles songs on which Paul McCartney used a 1966 Fender Jazz Bass rather than his better-known 1963 Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass or his 1964 Rickenbacker 4001S-LH (Fire-glo) bass. Contributing to the live sound of the recording, loud yelling between band members can be heard in the instrumental tracks. […]

This is one of the things that makes you play great, when you’re packed together. We knew that in the Beatles. We always used to record in Abbey Road, Studio 2. But for “Yer Blues,” we were talking about this tightness, this packed-in-a-tin thing. So we got in a little cupboard – a closet that had microphone leads and things, with a drum kit, amps turned to the walls, one mic for John. We did “Yer Blues” live and it was really good.

Paul McCartney – from Paul McCartney Looks Back: The Rolling Stone Interview, August 2016

From The Usenet Guide to Beatles Recording Variations:

[a] mono 14,20 Aug 1968. edited.
UK: Apple PMC 7068 white album 1968.

[b] stereo 14 Oct 1968. edited.
UK: Apple PCS 7068 white album 1968.
US: Apple SWBO 101 white album 1968.
CD: EMI CDP 7 46443 2 white album 1987.

The 2d generation tape is an edit of two takes, each of the two tapes being itself a mixdown from the original 4-track. The edit causes an abrupt transition at the end of the guitar solos. In stereo, traces of other vocal and guitar parts can be heard throughout the song in the left channel, including something shouted over parts of the vocal and what sounds like another different guitar solo. After the edit, the trace lead vocal suggests we are hearing the first part of the song from the other take.

The edit in the mixes added the countdown intro, which is louder in mono [a]. [a] is 11 seconds longer, long fade.

Last updated on September 10, 2021

Lyrics

Variations