Hey Jude! One of the Beatles’ most recognizable and spectacular songs. Really interesting things about the song and what was going on with the Beatles at the time. It was written by Paul in 1968, June of 1968 he said as he was driving down a country road and thinking about various things and so kind of composed in his head and what was going on at the time, they were just about to spend some time in the studio, they had been recording the white album around the time, an album called The Beatles. I just happened to have it handy here and an album that looked like this and our fab four guys including pictures of all of them I think came with this album, that’s great.

So here we have the important parts, we have pictures-Paul McCartney. Who else was in here? John Lennon. Ringo Starr, George Harrison. At least, I think that was George, figured by the process of elimination, he had to be there. Some great cutouts and stuff-not cutouts, that was Sergeant Pepper, but poster with all kinds of cool stuff on it came with the white album, but something that had been going on, George Martin had made a habit of recording certain songs and designating them to be singles and other songs to be album songs and pretty much never put the singles on the albums.

Now, he hasn’t been at-this was one of the biggest mistakes he made as he helped out with the Beatles career, but his philosophy on that was that he didn’t want people paying twice for the same song. If they bought the single, they buy the album, you get different stuff. Now, there were definitely some exceptions to this, but nowadays, people don’t buy singles or at least by the middle of the Beatles career nowadays, 4 years ago is what I’m really talking about now. By the middle of the Beatles’ career, people were buying more albums than singles and not worried about picking up the album if they already had the single, they’d pick up the single to see if they like it and then pick up the album-

What was the single, for those uninitiated folks? A single was a vinyl record, about 7 inches across, called the “45,” with a big hole in the middle of it. It can be part of Hey Jude guitar lesson now, but it was supposed to be a single about the same time as the White album was going to be out, too. The White album (or, officially, The Beatles) had some great tunes on it. My guitar is gently weeping right now, but let’s take a look at a few others. George wrote Piggies, a song; Savoie Truffle, a song about candy, Dear Prudence… but back to the subject of Hey Jude.

In Hey Jude, Paul had kind of come up with this little idea of trying to console John’s five year old son, Julian, now John was going through a divorce at the time with his first wife, Cynthia and it was still before he met Yoko, but Paul kind of put this song together as just a little pat on the back, it’s okay things will be fine and everything else will-the world will stay together for you, young man! And he demoed the song for the band in late June, played it for John at least and sang it and this is a great example of the way they work together because Paul was not a hundred percent confident in the lyrics. There was a lyric that really bugged him and he thought, this line is just not very good and it’s the line that goes, “The movement you need is on your shoulder.” And he said, he looked at John and said, don’t worry, I’ll change that.

John looked at him and says, “It’s the best line in the song. You’ve got to keep it, that’s not going anywhere.” And as Paul thought back, he thought, well, okay, he sees something in it, he’s right. It’s staying.

That’s a really good example of a couple of great songwriters getting together and doing some cooperative writing. He and John got together, practiced a few times, Paul put together some harmonies and other things the song needed, and then they planned to record it. They began to work on it in August of 1968, toward the end, something like the 29th or 30th. George Martin decided that there should be strings on it and other “big stuff,” with an orchestra and a lot of other people. They had tried to do this before, squeezing in an orchestra, and a lot of other people, when they recorded A Day in the Life at Abbey Road Studios, and it hadn’t worked out. This just wasn’t meant for something that elaborate.

So they moved the whole project away to another studio that had been used by some other artist at the time, James Taylor and Jackie Lomax called Soho Trident Studios and hired an orchestra, brought in 40 pieces or something like that, check my notes, violins, cellos, 20 pieces and then asked them to stick around and sing along on the chanting part towards the end, nah-nah-nah-I just went in the wrong key, that’s okay.

And the classical musicians love this because it meant they got paid double for doing two different things, for playing their instrument and singing, being part of the choir. So that was a good deal. Everybody made out pretty well at the Hey Jude recording sessions.

A few other kind of interesting things, in the United States, the albums-the United States was not as much into singles and album separation because we were used to albums having a hit song, so if you-you wouldn’t necessarily buy the singles, you buy the album to have everything, but Capitol Records released this album here a little bit later, actually I think it was 1970 when this came out called Hey Jude. Now, this album had a bunch of songs that had been singles that had not been on other albums because of the way Capitol released things back then. So we’ve got stuff like Paperback Rider from quite a bit earlier, Revolution from around the same time, but this was the electric version of Revolution that was the single and not the one that was on the white album, I Should Have Known Better that was of course from A Hard Day’s Night, but got cut from the movie so it consequently got cut from the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack that was released here, the red cover and the pictures of them.

And then a couple of older-later songs that hadn’t been out there, the Ballad of John and Yoko was another one that was just sort of floating around as a single and George’s song, Old Brown Shoe. So this album collector’s item nowadays, but most of these songs are available on the-instead, you can pick them up on Past Masters Volume Two-another great place to pick up all the cool Beatles tunes.

So another pretty-kind of interesting thing about this, the fade out at the end, this is one of the longer Beatles tunes out there, not the longest, not even second longest, but close, actually, it might be second, not counting Revolution-we’ve got to throw that one out of the mix, but the kind of anthem like fadeout at the end, where they’re just singing and then Paul starts kind of soulfully scat singing over some things that doesn’t always necessarily mix with the song, it’s a little too much of the flick your beak kind of feel, but there were other songs that had done stuff like this in particular, one by Donovan, the English folk singer, Donovan Leech had a tune called Atlantis that also ended with a long drawn out ending and I think there was something in Paul’s head that said, I’m going to one up Donovan on this, we’re going to make our ending bigger than his and this was an attitude that Paul had about a lot of songs because he had also heard P-towns and talked about The Who having just made, I think it was my generation, but in any case, it was P was saying, we just made the raunchiest rock and roll song ever and when Paul heard that, he decided he had to do-

Helter Skelter, Paul’s idea of topping everybody in raunchiness. Reasonably successful probably in that regard, but another example of Paul or everybody trying to top things was there was a song that was popular here in the United States at the same time called MacArthur Park written by Jimmy Web and sung by Richard Harris, I believe, a long song and actually up until that point, really the longest song that had been a hit on the radio.

So Hey Jude fades out, got a nice long fadeout and is one second longer than MacArthur Park. Accident? Probably not! At least according to Jimmy Web, now Jimmy Web wrote some great songs too, so we can’t discount him, wrote Galveston, By the Time I Get to Phoenix-particularly songs that were done by Glen Campbell back in the late 60s, phenomenal songs here in the United States, but-the end of the story on Hey Jude was that this has really become one of the most requested songs that people love to play and sing and it’s very simple. The chord progression, it’s very simple, chord one to chord five-I’m playing it in G here, the original key was E or F depending on which recording you hear. The final one came out in F by the way, but after chord one and five, it goes to a five, seven, D7, when I’m hearing G and then back to G and then finally to chord 4, the subdominant C.

That’s a really simple chord progression for this Hey Jude guitar lesson, but Paul’s melody was just spectacular, almost hymn like. Everything that went into this added up to what was a great song. Hey Jude is still popular, on everybody’s iPod, pretty much, and on their playlists; it’s also popular for playing, so much so that it could be called the Hey Jude guitar lesson — and you can learn to play with the Beatles Hey Jude guitar lesson — or the piano; the piano for Hey Jude is also pretty simple, just a chord and bass note, like so.

A couple of examples there of what the chords one, five and five seven sound like in the key of F, but Hey Jude should be on everybody’s heavy rotation list. That was the word I was looking for. If you were a radio station, you should be playing Hey Jude just about everyday!

Bob Smith has been playing and teaching guitar for over 30 years. For guitar lessons visit TotallyGuitars.com. You can find the Hey Jude Guitar Lesson Preview there as well.