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The Beatles · S1 E4
Julia
John's mother teaches him banjo chords, buys him a guitar, and fills his weekends with rock and roll records. Then, on July 15, 1958, she is killed by an off-duty police officer's car
A Saturday afternoon at Mendips, 1956. Julia Lennon sits on the front porch with her fifteen-year-old son and teaches him banjo chords while Aunt Mimi watches from the kitchen, disapproving of everything she sees.
The most covered song in history, written about waking up and finding everything has changed. Paul has said the emotional core traces back to losing his mother Mary, the same kind of grief that bonds him to John.
Yesterday (1965)
Paul dreamed the melody and woke up convinced he had stolen it. He spent weeks playing it for people, asking if they recognized it. Nobody did. He gave it the working title "Scrambled Eggs" because those were the words he sang over breakfast. George Martin scored a string quartet to accompany Paul's acoustic guitar, and the other three Beatles do not play on the recording at all, a first for the band.
The Woman Who Gave Him Away
Julia keeps John until he is five, then hands him to her sister Mimi because her new partner Bobby Dykins does not want to raise another man's child. She moves nearby and starts a new family. John visits on weekends, and it is Julia, not Mimi, who fills his head with Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and rock and roll.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did Julia's banjo lessons accidentally shape John Lennon's guitar style?
“John's mum got killed just about a year after my mum died. So that was a very big bond between us, actually. A very deep bond.”
— Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 2000
Mother (John Lennon)
From Plastic Ono Band (1970). Twelve years after Julia's death, John records the rawest song of his career. It opens with four funeral bells, then his voice over a spare piano: "Mother, you had me but I never had you." The song ends with him screaming until his voice breaks.
What was Julia doing just before the accident that killed her on July 15, 1958?
Two boys in Liverpool, both motherless, both carrying grief they cannot yet express. Next: Paul loses Mary to cancer at fourteen, and the shared wound bonds Lennon and McCartney before they write a single song together.
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