Yesterday

Paul McCartney woke one morning in early 1964 in the attic bedroom of Jane Asher's parents' house in Wimpole Street with a complete melody in his head. Convinced he must have heard it before, he played it for weeks to anyone who would listen — George Martin, Alma Cogan, friends in London — asking if they recognised it. When nobody did, he wrote lyrics around the working-title 'Scrambled Eggs' (the original first line: 'Scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs').

Recorded solo at Abbey Road on 14 June 1965 — a Beatles first. McCartney sang and played acoustic guitar in two takes; George Martin then booked a string quartet (Tony Gilbert, Sidney Sax, Francisco Gabarro and Kenneth Essex) for an overdub session a week later. Lennon, Harrison and Starr played nothing. Lennon resented the resulting solo billing and vetoed the song's release as a UK single — though it did become a US Capitol single and the most-covered song of the twentieth century.

More than 2,200 documented cover versions by 1986 (Guinness Book of World Records). Frank Sinatra recorded it three times; Ray Charles took it to the R&B charts; Elvis Presley sang it in concert. McCartney's vocal-and-acoustic-and-strings template became the lingua franca of singer-songwriter pop for sixty years.