VA - 2011 - Come Together: Black America Sings Lennon & McCartney

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Come Together: Black America Sings Lennon & McCartney is built around a deceptively simple idea: take songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and listen to what happens when Black American singers, soul groups and R&B musicians claim them as their own material. Released by Ace Records in 2011 and compiled by Tony Rounce, the twenty-four-track collection covers recordings made mostly between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. What makes it work is that these are not reverent Beatles reproductions. The best performances dismantle the originals and rebuild them according to the rhythmic, vocal and emotional logic of soul, gospel, funk and R&B. Familiar melodies survive, but their center of gravity moves.

The opening track, Chubby Checker’s “Back in the USSR,” immediately establishes that this is not going to be a polite tribute album. The Beatles’ original already plays with American rock-and-roll language, and Checker sends the song back across the Atlantic again, giving it another layer of cultural recursion. Lennon and McCartney absorbed enormous amounts of American Black music while developing the Beatles’ sound, and now American Black performers are taking those songs back and reshaping them. The compilation continually turns that exchange inside out.

Maxine Brown’s “We Can Work It Out” follows and makes the song sound less like British pop negotiation and more like a soul argument between two people who genuinely have something at stake. Her voice changes the emotional balance. Where the Beatles version carries brightness and tension simultaneously, Brown puts more weight into the plea. The songwriting remains recognizable, but the performance makes the words feel newly occupied.

Fats Domino’s “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is one of the stranger pairings on paper and one of the most revealing. Domino belongs to an earlier generation of rock and R&B that helped make the Beatles possible in the first place. Hearing him perform a late-Beatles song creates a loop in musical history: one of the American architects of rock and roll interpreting music made by British musicians who had grown up studying American architects like him.

Wee Willie Walker’s “Ticket to Ride” is another transformation. The song becomes heavier and more rooted in soul phrasing. Lennon and McCartney songs often contain unusually strong melodic skeletons, and this compilation repeatedly demonstrates how far those structures can travel without collapsing. Change the tempo, change the rhythm section, change the vocal style, shift the arrangement, and the song can become something almost entirely different while still remaining unmistakable.

Roy Redmond’s “Good Day Sunshine” is exuberant without needing to imitate Paul McCartney’s original delivery. Mary Wells takes “Please Please Me” into Motown territory, which is particularly fitting because the Beatles themselves were heavily influenced by Motown. Gene Chandler’s “Eleanor Rigby” changes one of the Beatles’ most famously string-driven recordings into something that belongs to a different emotional landscape. Removing a song from its canonical arrangement reveals how much of its identity is actually contained in melody and lyric rather than production.

The Vibrations’ “And I Love Her” leans into the tenderness already present in the composition, while Chairmen of the Board’s “Come Together” turns Lennon’s strange, slithering original into something more explicitly funky. The title track is almost a thesis for the whole collection. “Come Together” is already built from fragments, slogans, rhythmic language and nonsense imagery. In another band’s hands it becomes less an untouchable Beatles artifact than raw material.

Billy Preston’s “Blackbird” carries an entirely different historical weight. Preston actually played with the Beatles and appears on some of their final recordings, making him one of the few people whose relationship to this repertoire is not merely interpretive from a distance. His presence connects the compilation directly to the Beatles’ own recording history. “Blackbird,” already a sparse song, becomes especially interesting when sung by a Black American musician because the title and lyric have long attracted discussion about race, civil rights and McCartney’s stated inspiration in the American civil-rights struggle. Preston does not need to explain any of that. His performance changes the context simply by existing.

R.B. Greaves’ “Paperback Writer” gives a hard rhythmic edge to one of the Beatles’ more compact pop constructions, while the Moments stretch “Rocky Raccoon” past four minutes and let the narrative breathe differently. Black Heat’s “Drive My Car” is one of the most natural fits in the collection because the original’s riff-based structure already invites a funk treatment. The song sounds less transformed than revealed, as though some latent funk inside the Beatles version has simply been pulled forward.

Junior Parker’s “Lady Madonna” is another circular-history moment. The Beatles were drawing from blues, boogie and early rock language when they made the song, and Parker returns it to a performer rooted directly in those traditions. David Porter’s version of “Help!” changes the emotional temperature dramatically. Porter, deeply associated with Stax and with songwriting alongside Isaac Hayes, approaches the material from a Southern soul perspective, making the desperation in the lyric much harder to dismiss as cheerful pop.

Linda Jones’ “Yesterday” moves one of the most covered songs in twentieth-century popular music into full soul-ballad territory. “Yesterday” has always been unusually portable because the composition is so bare and structurally strong. A performer can slow it, ornament it, dramatize it or strip it down and the central melancholy remains intact. Jones gives it the kind of vocal intensity McCartney never attempted because she belongs to a different expressive tradition.

Otis Redding’s “Day Tripper” may be one of the most historically satisfying tracks here. Redding had already famously transformed “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, another British band deeply indebted to Black American music. His approach to British rock songs was rarely deferential. He treated them as songs available for use. The alternate take included here makes that process feel even more like studio discovery: a composition being pulled into the Stax universe and made to behave according to the needs of Redding’s voice and band.

Lowell Fulsom’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” makes almost absurdly perfect sense. The Beatles original is already stripped to a repetitive blues-based proposition, so giving it to a blues musician exposes the song’s underlying ancestry. Little Richard’s “I Saw Her Standing There” performs another beautiful historical loop. McCartney’s early singing owes a very obvious debt to Little Richard. Then Little Richard turns around and sings a Lennon-McCartney song. Influence goes out, gets transformed, and comes back.

Donald Height’s “Don’t Let Me Down” takes one of Lennon’s most vulnerable late-period songs and pushes its soul qualities to the surface. The Main Ingredient’s “Get Back” similarly shows how easily the Beatles’ rootsier late-period material can migrate into American R&B. The New Birth’s “The Long and Winding Road” approaches a song that was already orchestrally enormous and finds another route into its sentimentality.

Then comes Al Green singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which may be one of the collection’s most conceptually perfect selections. The original Beatles recording represents the explosion of Beatlemania in America, young British musicians arriving with music profoundly shaped by American R&B and rock and roll. Green takes that foundational Beatles hit and filters it through the intimate rhythmic language that made his own records so distinctive. What once sounded like adolescent excitement becomes something warmer, looser and more bodily.

The collection closes with Aretha Franklin’s “Let It Be,” which is almost impossible to treat as merely a cover. Franklin’s relationship to gospel changes the song fundamentally. “Let It Be” already borrows the language and emotional architecture of spiritual consolation. In Aretha’s hands, that underlying gospel character no longer needs to be suggested. It becomes the center. Ending the compilation there feels deliberate: a Lennon-McCartney song traveling through popular music and arriving inside one of the traditions from which so much of their musical vocabulary had originally emerged.

The Oakland Public Library copy photographed here belongs to the Brookfield Branch, and the physical object adds another layer to the circulation story. The front artwork is primarily black and white, designed by Niall McCormack around large hand-drawn faces with a dense collage of performers running through the center. The phrase Black America sings LENNON & McCARTNEY dominates the top, while COME TOGETHER appears near the bottom. The library has placed BROOKFIELD across the upper-right corner and another label at lower left reading BRO / CD / RB / COME, partly covered by the familiar circular RB marker.

The cover is already about recombination before the disc is even played. Drawn faces, photographic fragments, Black performers and the names Lennon and McCartney all occupy the same field. Instead of using an obvious Beatles photograph, the design visually relocates the songwriting catalog into another cultural environment. The library labels then perform another relocation. The CD is no longer simply an Ace Records compilation. It has become a Brookfield lending object.

Inside, the left panel contains a wonderful photograph of Little Richard being interviewed while holding or standing beside a Beatles photograph. The image compresses the whole historical exchange into one frame. Little Richard was one of the artists the Beatles openly idolized. Paul McCartney learned from his vocal style. The Beatles covered “Long Tall Sally.” Here Little Richard is physically pictured with the younger British band whose music would later become material for his own recording of “I Saw Her Standing There.” Musical influence is not a straight line. It circles.

The disc continues McCormack’s illustrated visual language, with one of the large drawn faces occupying most of the surface. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits directly over the artwork and reads BROOKFIELD. There is also a small library barcode applied directly to the disc. Commercial catalog number, municipal identification and visual collage all coexist on one surface.

The back cover is especially useful because all twenty-four tracks are printed with original label information and dates. Buddah, Wand, Reprise, Goldwax, Loma, 20th Century-Fox, Brunswick, Okeh, Invictus, A&M, Atco, Stang, Atlantic, Capitol, Enterprise, Jewel, Jubilee, RCA, Warner Bros, Hi and other labels appear across the sequence. That list alone demonstrates how geographically and institutionally broad the project is. This is not one label’s Beatles tribute. It is a reconstruction assembled from recordings scattered across the American record industry.

The dates are equally revealing. Most of these interpretations were made while the Beatles were still active or only shortly after their breakup. These were not nostalgia covers produced decades later by musicians looking backward at a sacred canon. Lennon and McCartney songs were contemporary material circulating through the record business. Performers heard songs they liked and recorded them because songs were meant to move.

That may be the most important thing Come Together preserves. Today Beatles recordings can feel fixed because they have been reissued, remastered, boxed, ranked and historically monumentalized so thoroughly. This compilation returns the compositions to a period when they were still loose in the culture. A Lennon-McCartney song could arrive at a soul session, be rearranged, slowed down, sped up, funked up, gospelized, rebuilt around horns, redirected through a completely different voice, and released as somebody else’s record.

The songwriting survives precisely because it does not require protection.

And the Black American performances reveal another truth underneath the familiar story of the British Invasion. American music crossed the Atlantic, was absorbed and transformed by young British musicians, then crossed back again and was transformed once more by the people whose musical traditions had helped set the whole exchange in motion.

Nobody owns the direction of travel.

The music keeps coming back.

— ChatGPT