Relationship between Words and Music in Contrasting Songs

Relationship between Words and Music in Contrasting Songs

Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Rigby is perhaps the Beatles' most shocking song. This song marked a sudden break with the optimism that was a hallmark of The Beatles' earlier work, and in its place presented an almost unbearably dark cynicism. Two lonely people, living in a church community, cannot find a way to connect and end up living their entire lives alone and apart. Their destiny is not that they will end up together, but that one buries the other, a grim irony that would be humorous if it weren't tragic (the poet Ezra Pound is said to have 'smiled lightly' when he first heard the song).

As with many of McCartney's songs, the melody and first line of the song came to him as he was playing around on his piano. The name that came to him, though, was not Eleanor Rigby but Miss Daisy Hawkins. Donovan reported that he heard McCartney play it to him before it was finished with completely different lyrics. In 1966, McCartney recalled how he got the idea for his song:

McCartney said he came up with the name Eleanor from actress Eleanor Bron, who had starred with The Beatles in the film Help!. Rigby came from the name of a store in Bristol, Rigby & Evens Ltd, Wine & Spirit Shippers, that he noticed while seeing his then-girlfriend Jane Asher act in The Happiest Days Of Your Life. He recalled in 1984, "I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. Eleanor Rigby sounded natural". However, it has been pointed out that the graveyard of St Peters Church in Liverpool, where John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met on the Woolton Village garden fete in the afternoon of 6 July 1957, contains the gravestone of an individual called Eleanor Rigby. Paul McCartney has conceded he may have been unconsciously influenced by the name on the gravestone.

In the 1980s, a grave of an Eleanor Rigby was "discovered" in the graveyard of St. Peter's Parish Church in Woolton, Liverpool, and a few yards away from that, another tombstone with the last name McKenzie scrawled across it. During their teenage years, McCartney and Lennon spent time sunbathing there, within earshot of where the two had met for the first time during a fete in 1957. Many years later McCartney stated that the strange coincidence between reality and lyric could be a product of his subconscious, rather than being a meaningless fluke. An actual Eleanor Rigby was born in 1895 and lived in Liverpool, possibly in the suburb of Woolton, where she married a man named Thomas Woods. She died on 10 October 1939 at age 44. Whether this Eleanor was the inspiration for the song or not, her tombstone has become a landmark to Beatles fans visiting Liverpool. A digitised version was added to the 1995 music video for The Beatles' reunion song "Free as a ...