Don't Pass Me By
| "Don't Pass Me By" | |
|---|---|
| Song by The Beatles from the album The Beatles | |
| Published | Startling Music |
| Released | 22 November 1968 |
| Recorded | 5 June 1968 |
| Genre | Country rock |
| Length | 3:46 (mono version) 3:51 (stereo version) |
| Label | Apple |
| Writer(s) | Richard Starkey |
| Producer(s) | George Martin |
"Don't Pass Me By" is a song by the Beatles from the double album The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). It was written by Ringo Starr (his first solo composition).
The song debuted at No. 1 in Denmark in April 1969. It stayed in the Top 10 for a month.
Starr first played his song for the other Beatles soon after he joined the group in August 1962. Its earliest public mention seems to have been in a BBC chatter session introducing "And I Love Her" on the radio show Top Gear in 1964. In the conversation, Starr was asked if he had written a song and Paul McCartney mocked him soon afterwards, singing the first line "Don't pass me by, don't make me cry, don't make me blue, baby."
The song was recorded in four separate sessions in 1968: 5 and 6 June, and 5 and 12 July. Despite references to it in 1964 as "Don't Pass Me By", it was called "Ringo's Tune (Untitled)" on 5 June session tape label and "This Is Some Friendly" on 6 June label. By 12 July, the title was restored.
During a lead vocal track recorded on 6 June, Starr audibly counted out eight beats, and it can be heard in the released song starting at 2:30 of the 1987 CD version. The monaural mix is faster than the stereo mix, and features a different arrangement of violin in the fade-out.
George Martin arranged an orchestral interlude as an introduction, but this was rejected. It would eventually be used as an incidental cue for the Beatles' animated film Yellow Submarine. In 1996, the introduction was released as the track "A Beginning" on The Beatles Anthology 3 CD.
The line, "I'm sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair, You were in a car crash and you lost your hair", is cited by proponents of the "Paul is Dead" urban legend as a clue to McCartney's fate; the line "you lost your hair" is claimed to be a reference to "When I'm Sixty-Four" (which was written by McCartney). However, the expression "to lose one's hair" was a fairly common English idiom, and simply means "to become anxious or upset" (see, for instance, Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Death of the Heart, 1938).
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