Walking In The Park With Eloise

Song facts

From eil.com:

In downtime from a mid 70s Wings Nashville recording session the idea was mooted of an album of Macca songs that had been left off previous albums or had yet to find a home. ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’ was recorded around this time (with a view to going on the album) and was said to be inspired by a conversation between Chet Atkins (who plays on the record) and Paul McCartney about their respective fathers. With that in mind Paul duly dusted off this jazz/twenties inspired ditty which was actually written by his father James ‘Jim’ McCartney – he must have been attached to the song as years later Paul chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs.

While in Nashville we recorded about five tracks… one is a song written by Paul’s dad called “Walking In The Park With Eloise”, just music. When Paul was a little boy, about 10, even younger, he remembers sitting at the foot of the piano while his dad was playing this song. We were having dinner with Chet Atkins, the guitar player, one night in Nashville, and Paul had being playing a lot of his music for Chet and he said, “here, here’s one that my dad wrote long time ago” – and he started playing it.

Chet got talking to Paul, saying that the song should be recorded and that would be nice for his dad and so on. We thought, why not? So we got Chet playing on it and Floyd Cramer the piano player and Chet himself got together a nice little band called Country Hams with lots of other Nashville people. So there’s this single called “Walking In The Park With Eloise” by Country Hams coming out on EMI in a couple of weeks.

Linda McCartney – Interview with Sounds, October 5, 1974

Last updated on August 5, 2023