Everybody wanted to sing it, including the Beatles

The Liverpool connection

By the time Please Please Me was recorded in a single marathon session at EMI's Abbey Road studios in February 1963, the Beatles had been performing Shirelles material in Hamburg and Liverpool for at least two years. These were not peripheral album cuts they'd stumbled on — they were the group's biggest American records, songs the four musicians had learned from the vinyl itself and worked into their live set because the originals were that good and that durable. The Shirelles had given them a template: a defined lead vocal over tight group harmonies, an arrangement with genuine dynamic movement, and lyrics that treated teenage emotion as something worth taking seriously.

Boys, the B-side of the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", got the most startling transformation. In Shirley Owens's original version — recorded for Scepter in 1960 with Luther Dixon producing — the lyric describes wanting a boy. Ringo Starr sang it unchanged on Please Please Me, gender and all, and nobody appeared to find this especially remarkable. The track kept the rolling, propulsive feel of the Shirelles cut but pushed it harder, Beatles-style, with Starr's drumming up in the mix where it could drive the song. It remained in their live set for years.

Baby It's You was the other one. Burt Bacharach's melody, Mack David's lyric, Luther Dixon's production — the Shirelles original from late 1961 had a celeste threaded through the arrangement and a vocal recorded with an intimacy that was unusual for the era. The Beatles' version, also on Please Please Me, kept the basic structure but stripped the delicacy back; what was subtle became direct. John Lennon sang lead, and the track was released as a single on the EP The Beatles' Hits in the UK. That the Beatles chose these two records — not cover versions of American rock and roll in the conventional sense, but records made by Black teenage girls from Passaic, New Jersey — is worth noting plainly. They weren't mining a tradition at arm's length. They were copying specific hits they genuinely admired.

Ringo Starr sang it unchanged on Please Please Me, gender and all, and nobody appeared to find this especially remarkable.

The catalogue disperses

The Shirelles' catalogue proved to be among the most covered of any group from the early 1960s, a fact that throws the story of what the contracts did into sharp relief. The songs kept generating performance income and mechanical royalties for decades — income that, because of the way Florence Greenberg's Scepter Records handled the group's finances and publishing arrangements, the four women from Passaic saw very little of in real time.

"Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the Gerry Goffin and Carole King song that became the first record by a Black girl group to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, in January 1961, was covered so widely and so continuously that tracking all versions becomes an exercise in genre tourism. Carole King recorded her own version for Tapestry in 1971, rearranging the song at a slower tempo with a piano-led arrangement that repositioned it as confessional singer-songwriter material rather than pop production. The recording became one of the better-known tracks on an album that spent years on the charts and sold in extraordinary numbers. That King's own version of her own song became a canonical recording is an interesting fact about how the music industry canonises things: the Shirelles' original was the commercial breakthrough, but Tapestry gave the song a second life in a different demographic.

The covers across those forty years included Dave Mason, whose 1978 version charted in the United States; Roberta Flack; the Four Seasons; and a long list of artists for whom the song was an opportunity to demonstrate vocal range against a melody with genuine emotional movement. Each of these versions generated mechanical royalties payable to the songwriters and publisher. Goffin and King had signed their songs to Don Kirshner's Aldon Music ↗ as staff writers working out of 1650 Broadway in New York — meaning the publishing income flowed through a structure the writers themselves did not control, a standard arrangement at the time and one that took years of renegotiation to partially unwind.

"Dedicated to the One I Love" — a record the Shirelles first cut for Scepter in 1959 and then reissued in 1961, charting higher the second time — was covered by the Mamas & the Papas in 1967, where it became a top-five hit and introduced the song to an audience that had been in primary school when the original was current. The Mamas & the Papas version, produced by Lou Adler, has a different weight from the Shirelles' — more orchestral cushion, more West Coast studio gloss — but the underlying song survived the translation intact. That a song can be covered successfully in two entirely different production idioms, a decade apart, says something about the quality of what Addie Harris, Doris Coley, Beverly Lee and Shirley Owens put on tape the first time.

What the covers cost and what they proved

The paradox of a heavily covered catalogue is that it proves the original's quality while simultaneously enriching everyone downstream. Each new version of a Shirelles song confirmed that the songwriting and the arrangement had genuine merit — and sent money to publishers, songwriters and, in some cases, original performers through ASCAP and BMI performance royalty systems ↗ — but the group's own ability to benefit from this validation was constrained by agreements they had signed as teenagers in Passaic, managed by adults they trusted, and couldn't easily revisit.

The Beatles' covers did something specific: they put Shirelles songs in front of a British and then a global audience that had limited access to American R&B records in 1963. When Please Please Me sold, "Boys" and "Baby It's You" sold with it, and the Shirelles' names — Scepter Records, Luther Dixon's productions, Goffin and King's writing credits — circulated in a market that might not have found them otherwise. Whether the four women from Passaic saw that circulation translated into income commensurate with the exposure is a different question, and not one the covers industry was designed to answer in their favour.

That the records were worth covering at all, and kept being worth covering for four decades, is the fact that the covers themselves establish beyond any argument.