Paul McCartney says he traded in gift for a guitar because he ‘wouldn’t be able to sing’ with a trumpet

A gift given to legendary songwriter Paul McCartney by his father was traded in for a guitar, as he “wouldn’t be able to sing” if using it.

Though he ditched the trumpet for a Zenith guitar, which he still owns, McCartney says part of the reason he wanted a guitar was to follow in the footsteps of his idols. The Beatles member would follow the likes of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley when it came to music-making, and he couldn’t do that with a trumpet. McCartney did say he “loved” the trumpet, but it stood in the way of the rock and roll musician he became. McCartney had not initially set out to be a rock and roll player, but it ended up that way, and getting a guitar was the start. He had initially wanted to be a trumpeter, but that was because there were “a lot of them” in those days.

McCartney said as much on the Anthology documentary, and recalled his early years of musical influences. He said: “My dad bought me a trumpet for my birthday, at Rushworth & Draper’s (the other music store in town), and I loved it.

“There was a big hero-thing at the time. There had been Harry James – The Man With The Golden Trumpet – and now, in the Fifties, it was Eddie Calvert, a big British star who played Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White – all those gimmicky trumpet records. There were a lot of them around back then, so we all wanted to be trumpeters.

“I persevered with the trumpet for a while. I learnt ‘The Saints’, which I can still play in C. I learnt my C scale, and a couple of things. Then I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to sing with this thing stuck in my mouth, so I asked my dad if he’d mind if I swapped it for a guitar, which also fascinated me. He didn’t, and I traded my trumpet in for an acoustic guitar, a Zenith, which I still have.”

McCartney would be open about his other musical influences too, with Elvis Presley a major part of his early years. The Let It Be hitmaker was described as “what we had been waiting for.” The songwriter would also dub The King a “guru” of music, whose influence was clear.

He would go on to share Presley was a “good looking” musician, though it was not the music he first noticed. McCartney said: “I remember being in school when I was a kid and somebody had a picture in one of the musical papers of Elvis Presley. I think it was an advert for Heartbreak Hotel. I just looked at it and thought ‘he’s so good looking, he looks perfect.’”

Heartbreak Hotel would release on January 27, 1956, and was a Billboard Top 100 chart topper. The two-minute track would leave a lasting impression on John Lennon, too, with the Imagine hitmaker considering Heartbreak Hotel a “great” alternative to American music of the times.

He told the NME: “We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They always sang like Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about … It took us a long time to work what was going on. To us, it just sounded as a noise that was great.”