An early influence on songwriter John Lennon, beyond the likes of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, was his mother.
The future Beatles member would credit his mother, Julia Lennon, as kindling his interest in music. Though Lennon’s mother would die in 1958, never seeing the success of her son’s life-changing music, the Imagine hitmaker described that reconnecting with Julia was a part of his musical journey. One of his earliest memories with his mother comes when she taught Lennon how to perform a Fats Domino hit on the banjo. Lennon would progress from banjo to guitar, and the rest is history, with the Come Together writer meeting Paul McCartney at a village fete and inviting him to join The Quarrymen.
Lennon said: “When I was sixteen, I had re-established a relationship with my mother for about four years, and she taught me music. She first of all taught me the banjo, and from that I progressed to guitar. The first song I learnt was Ain’t That a Shame, an old rock hit.”
Beyond his mother’s influence, Lennon would cite The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, as a massive influence on his career. The Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney would also say the Blue Suede Shoes hitmaker was a major influence in the early years of rock and roll history.
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, 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.”
In the first episode of the documentary series Anthology, which sees McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr recall their earliest music memories, the Let It Be hitmaker drops a few names of influence.
But one stood out among them all, with McCartney saying Elvis Presley was “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.’”
