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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.

Paul decided that he would try to console Julian, John’s five-year-old son. He wrote Hey Jude for Julian because John was going through a divorce with his first wife and Julian’s mother, Cynthia. This was before he met Yoko Ono, but Paul composed this song to simply say, “It’s okay, everything is going to be fine.” He demonstrated the song for the band soon after, in late June, played and sang it for John — which is a great way to show how they worked together, because Paul wasn’t entirely sure about the lyrics he’d used. One lyric in particular bothered him, and he thought that it wasn’t very good. That lyric was, “The movement you need is on your shoulder.” He said he told John after he’d sung it that he would change it.

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.

So a good example of cooperative song writing between a couple of great songwriters. So they got together and they practiced it a few times, Paul worked on some harmonies and stuff like that and they planned on recording it, they started working on it towards the end of August in the 1968-29th, 30th or so of August and knew that-George Martin decided they wanted to put strings on it and choired. They needed to have all kinds of big stuff in it and they had tried before to squeeze in some-an orchestra and a lot of people when they were recording A Day in the Life at Abbey Road Studios and it didn’t work. It was just not cut out for something that big.

Because of that, they took the whole project and went to another location, Soho Trident Studios, which had also been used by Jackie Lomax and James Taylor. They hired an orchestra, something like 40 people strong, with cellos, 20 pieces, violins, and then asked those people to stay put and sing at the end of Hey Jude, the “Nah, nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah” line. (Wrong key, but that’s okay.)

The musicians were really happy to do this because it meant they got double pay for doing two different things — playing and singing as part of the choir, too. It was a good deal for everyone and everyone did pretty well at these recording sessions for Hey Jude.

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.

Later songs were included, too, such as the Ballad of John and Yoko, and George’s song, Old Brown Shoe. This item is highly prized by collectors and these days, but you can also take most of these songs up on Past Masters Volume 2, which is another great way to get all of the old Beatles tunes you’re missing.

With the fade out at the end, this is one of the longer Beatles tunes available, probably second longest not counting Revolution. There is an anthem-like fade out at the end, where the Beatles are just singing and Paul just kind of improvises over things that haven’t always mixed. There were other songs, too, like those by Donovan Leech, the English folk singer. At that time, he had a song called Atlantis that had something like that ending, so that Paul said to himself that he should try to do that, with a bigger ending. Paul thought that about a lot of songs because he had also heard P-towns; they had just made what I think was My Generation, and Paul thought that he had to beat P’s “raunchy rock ‘n roll song.”

So that introduced Helter-Skelter, which Paul clearly felt was going to be topping everybody when it came to “raunchy.” It was reasonably successful, but another popular song in the United States was called MacArthur Park, written by Jimmy Webb and sung by Richard Harris. Up until that point, that had been the longest song that had actually been a radio pick.

Anyway, back to our Hey Jude guitar lesson (and remember, you can learn Beatles Hey Jude guitar lesson, too). Hey Jude goes into a fade out, and it’s just one second longer than Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park. Is that an accident? Probably not, according to Jimmy, at least. Of course, Jimmy wrote some great songs, like By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Galveston, songs that Glen Campbell had done back in the late 1960s, and that had done really well in the United States. The moral of this story on Hey Jude was that this is one of the most requested songs — still — that people love to play and sing come including for a Hey Jude guitar lesson. The cord progression is very simple, I to V. Learn Beatles Hey Jude guitar lesson here is that it’s really simple; this is in the key of G, but the original was in E or F, depending on the recording you’re listening to. The final goes to F, but after chords I and V, it goes to V, and then vii, D7, here in G, back to IV, the sub dominant C.

So, very simple chord progression, but Paul put together again just a spectacular melody, little hymn like and stuff, but the context and everything that went with this was just all added up to be in a great tune. So Hey Jude has got to be high on everybody’s iPod and playlist, request list, guitar lesson list, piano lesson list and playing the piano part to Hey Jude is actually very simple because all you need to do is play a chord and then play a base note, sounds something like this.

Those are chords I, vii, and V:vii in the key of F, but Hey Jude should definitely be on your playlist. Rotation, that’s the word. If you were a radio station, you’d be playing Hey Jude every day — and can, with a Hey Jude guitar lesson.

Craig Danielson 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.

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