Paul McCartney Reveals Beatles ‘White Album’ Hit That Was A Western Parody

We always applaud Paul McCartney and his serious work ethic revolving around music; yet, we can’t help but gush over the musician’s knack for making quirky and fun songs.

McCartney, who ignited his fame as one of the members of one of the greatest bands of all time, The Beatles, has developed quite a skill in creating chart-topping singles and groundbreaking albums. But this isn’t always the case for the musician, who’s also quite known for making song parodies or children’s rhymes as much as he could.

Under The Beatles’ influential self-titled double album (known by many as the White album), we can notice a lot of humorous songs that were mostly created by The Fab Four for fun purposes. There, we have George Harrison’s parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, with the song’s title named “Piggies.” Next is McCartney’s “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” which was a parody of Beach Boys and Chuck Berry’s respective songs (“California Girls” and “Back in the U.S.A.”). And then, we also have the latter’s “Rocky Raccoon.”

Macca explained the beginnings of “Rocky Raccoon” in the 1997 autobiographical book Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. Calling the song quirky just like him, he explained: “I like talking blues so I started off like that, then I did my tongue-in-cheek parody of a Western and threw in some amusing lines. I just tried to keep it amusing, really; it’s me writing a play, a little one-act play giving them most of the dialogue.”

The song is among the few songs conceived during The Beatles’ trip to India to study Transcendental meditation. He thought of the song while playing guitar with John Lennon and Donovan Leitch inside Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s camp. Written in a pastiche form, it resembles a folk tune that’s somewhat consistent with McCartney’s work over the years.

You can listen to the song below.