Ella Fitzgerald Sings Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and That "Ringo Beat!"
An ELLA FITZGERALD Birthday Month Special : Pop! Goes the Ella, Part 3
Pop! Goes The Ella - Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Great Hits of Today
(SSS #144 2025-03-19)
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“Can’t Buy Me Love”
This was by far the most successful of Fitzgerald’s seven Beatle-centric numbers. In fact, you might go so far as to say that this was the single most satisfying interpretation of a Beatles song by any member of the older generation, at least until 1969 or so when everybody - Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Ella herself - started singing George Harrison’s “Something.”
Fitzgerald had been the headliner on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 2, 1964 - sharing the spotlight with Sammy Davis, Jr. - and, like the rest of the country, she couldn’t help but take note of the tumult that the Beatles caused on the Sullivan broadcast of exactly one week later. She was touring in England in April of that year, a few weeks after the Beatles released their sixth single, “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Supposedly, producer George Martin was in the studio when he cut her high-energy, big band swing interpretation of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which would be released as a single as well as part of her album Hello, Dolly!- a so-called “cover” of another massive hit from the spring of 1964.
Fitzgerald and the Fab Four essentially validated each other: she was among the first (and certainly the best) established jazz-centric superstar to bless the songs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with her vote of confidence. Likewise, the Beatles gave Fitzgerald and her version of their song their full endorsement. (A few months later, when the Beatles shared a stage with Judy Garland, Lennon in particular was notoriously cruel to that particular old-guard living legend.)
When Fitzgerald first heard “Can’t Buy Me Love,” she described it as “almost a blues sequence,” and, in truth, she sings it like one of her blues-driven big band numbers, like “Teardrops From My Eyes” or “Hallelujah, I Love Him So.” The orchestration by British conductor Johnnie Spence genuflects in the direction of Ernie Wilkins and Bill Doggett. And she would keep singing “Can’t Buy Me Love” for years to come - famously at the Antibes Jazz Festival, in July 1964 (on one of her masterpiece concert albums, Ella at Juan-Les-Pins, with Tommy Flanagan and Roy Eldridge) and on TV variety shows, such as Dean Martin (December 1965) and Ed Sullivan as late as 1968. (The above clip is from April 28, 1968.)
“A Hard Day’s Night”
Fitzgerald sang this on one of her comparatively lesser-appreciated - but still great - concert albums, Ella in Hamburg (1965), taped at that city’s Musikhalle in March of 1965. It is even harder-edged and bluesier than “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and again the composers gave her their collective thumbs-up. Fitzgerald really tears into this one with considerable aggression. But although Verve also released this track as a 45 RPM single - that great rarity, a live single - it didn’t fare as well with Fitzgerald fans. However, she did sing it throughout her 1965 tours, and we have video of her performing it in Helsinki and at the Tivoli in Copenhagen (on July 6), wherein she uses it to open the concert, and even thanks Beatles fans. Too bad she didn’t also do a big band studio version.
“Hey Jude”
Once again, the official Ella Fitzgerald version of this relatively late Beatles song is from a live album, her excellent big band set from the Fairmont, San Francisco, released (originally in Germany) as Sunshine of Your Love. Again, she has lots of energy here and really gets into it - almost as if she viewed it as a challenge to show that she was still relevant even in an era of rapidly shifting musical tastes. In particular, she builds to a stunning climax on the song’s famous ascending line “better… Better… BETTER … BETTER!”
“Hey Jude” wasn’t released as a 45, but she sang it at other live concerts, as well as on both The Hollywood Palace (one of her two appearances on ABC’s Saturday night variety show) and even on a TV duet with Glen Campbell from March 1, 1970. For my dough, the most animated version is the 1969 Montreux reading above, which was a truly magical concert, made a few months after Tommy Flanagan had returned to Ella’s touring company (replacing Jimmy Jones, who essentially had replaced Flanagan from 1965 to 1968) and also included her amazing “A House Is Not a Home” that we heard last week. In my opinion, Ella makes this song better.. Better.. BETTER!
“Got to Get You Into My Life”
Five years after “Can’t Buy Me Love,” Ella is once again in London, this time working with the American producer / arranger Richard Perry for Reprise Records, in the aftermath of his massive success with two legendary albums, God Bless Tiny Tim and Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk. This time we hear Ella with familiar jazzy brass but also a pronounced electric bass and a soulful back-up choir. I feel like she didn’t really get to know the song - we don’t have any live versions or any TV performances, and it may be the least successful of her Beatles numbers. Even so, she doesn’t slough it off, but rather puts everything she’s got into it.
“Savoy Truffle”
This George Harrison song (from the 1968 double LP White Album) reads like a funk number with words by Willy Wonka. Yet, somehow I’ve always felt that this quasi-nonsensical number suited Fitzgerald surprisingly well - the combination of the funky beat, the chiming electric keyboard, a considerably louder choir behind her, and the candy-centric text kind of all comes together. This could have gone on the flip side of “Knock Me a Kiss” (on the 1958 Ella Swings Lightly) not only for the words, but because it’s essentially a riff for dancing, and the logical extension of all those little yellow baskets and wubba dollies that she had been singing about at the Savoy Ballroom 30 years earlier. (Oh she’s a cinnamon sinner - selling lollipop lies!)
“Something”
This is the only slow love song in Fitzgerald’s “Beatles Cycle,” and she does an excellent job with it. I only knew of one performance by Ella, from the 1971 Nice Jazz Festival, until this still otherwise undocumented show from Belgrade (in Serbia, what was then part of the former Yugoslavia) turned up unexpectedly on YouTube. Both are good, although the Belgrade version may have the edge. She still improvises and plays with the tune, although Flanagan seems a little hemmed in on both; one wishes they had given him license to alter the tune more to his liking. It would have been interesting to hear Ella do a full-on saloon song version of this, with a studio orchestra and strings, the way Tony did (with the great Peter Matz arrangement on the 1970 album fully titled Tony Bennett’s “Something”) as well as Sinatra (the even-greater Nelson Riddle arrangement on Trilogy, not the earlier single).
“Ringo Beat”
(words & music by Ella Fitzgerald)
Okay, so it’s admittedly difficult to spin this 1964 single as another major triumph for Fitzgerald. A few months after she enjoyed the success of her version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” she came up with this homage to the Beatles and the new music in general. Guitarist Barney Kessel is credited with this chart, featuring a chiming choir going “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” and he wrote the number on the B-side, “I'm Fallin' In Love.”
As Ian Whitcomb once observed, the first big song in any new genre is always a song about the music itself, like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” or “Rock Around the Clock.” This was also the era of sequel songs, like Lieber and Stoller’s “Bear Cat,” as a follow-up to their own “Hound Dog,” and answer songs, like the innumerable follow-ups we waded through a few months ago to “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”” (Composer beware: any hit song whose title ends in a question mark is setting itself for an answer song to attempt to cash in on it.) Ella is essentially still doing what she did in 1936 with Chick Webb and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Sing Me A Swing Song (And Let Me Dance).”
Although a zillion young and not-so-young singers have done Ella Fitzgerald tribute albums, I’m still waiting for someone to do a songbook package of songs that the First Lady actually wrote, from “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” to “Oh, But I Do” (performed by the King Cole Trio) to “Ringo Beat.”
PS: Highly Recommended: The best-ever Ella Fitzgerald Discography, as compiled by the late Michele Scasso with considerable help and input from the mighty Steve Albin. Accessible here!
Coming soon:
Ella at the Movies
Ella sings Post Nuclear Broadway (including Chicago & The Wiz)
(Very special thanks to Elizabeth Zimmer & Dan Fortune for their expert proofing, hey!)
Coming on Wednesday April 30 @ 7:00PM, THE NEW YORK ADVENTURE CLUB presents TIN PAN ALLEY: THE BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICA’S MUSIC INDUSTRY (All presentations are available for replay viewing for one week after the live event. For more information & reservations, please click here.)
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