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The Beatles · S1 E2
June 18, 1942
James Paul McCartney is born in Walton Hospital. His father Jim is a cotton salesman who plays trumpet in a jazz band. Music is the family language
Walton Hospital, Liverpool, June 18, 1942. Mary McCartney, a midwife who has delivered hundreds of babies, gives birth to her own first son and names him James Paul.
"Mother Mary" is not the Virgin Mary. It is Mary Patricia McCartney, a Liverpool midwife who died when Paul was fourteen. She came to him in a dream during the band's darkest days and told him to let it be.
Let It Be (1970)
Paul dreamed about his mother during the tense Get Back sessions in January 1969. She had been dead for over a decade, but in the dream she appeared calm and reassuring. Billy Preston's gospel organ lifts the track into something sacred. Two versions exist: George Martin's stripped-back single mix and Phil Spector's orchestral album version. Fans have argued about which is better for fifty years.
The Cotton Man Who Played Jazz
Jim McCartney works at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange by day. In the 1920s he led Jim Mac's Jazz Band, playing trumpet and piano at dance halls across Merseyside. By the time Paul is born, the band days are over, but the upright piano stays in the living room.
TAP TO REVEAL: What instrument did Jim McCartney push Paul to learn first?
Before Paul was born, what was Jim McCartney's connection to the music world?
When I'm Sixty-Four (The Beatles)
From Sgt. Pepper (1967). Paul started writing this at about sixteen, sitting at his father's piano in 20 Forthlin Road. The music hall bounce is pure Jim McCartney: the style of jazz and vaudeville his dad loved. Paul finished it years later, but the song belongs to the living room where it started.
Two boys, born two years apart in the same city, with music running through both families. Next: the two houses that shaped them, Mendips in Woolton and Forthlin Road in Allerton, separated by a mile and a half of Liverpool streets.
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