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Last month, I was thinking about Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie," and I realized that it has a few similarities with the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There."
Just from what I remembered, I knew that the two songs both mention a seventeen-year-old girl standing around. "Little Queenie" has "There she is again, standin' over by the record machine" and "She's too cute to be a minute over seventeen." "I Saw Her Standing There" has "Well, she was just seventeen" and the titular "So how could I dance with another, ooh / When I saw her standin' there?"
When I compared the lyrics, I also found lines that talk about the girls' looks. "Little Queenie" looks like "a model on the cover of a magazine," and the girl in "I Saw Her Standing There" looks "way beyond compare."
The entirety of "Little Queenie" has the speaker/singer admiring the girl and merely thinking about asking her to dance, where those same elements comprise only the first stanza of "I Saw Her Standing There." The Beatles' singer/speaker actually takes his chance, and the third and fourth verses describe how they "danced through the night." To some degree, it's like the Beatles wrote what happens next.
I don't know if the Beatles were familiar with "Little Queenie," but Chuck Berry is certainly an acknowledged influence, and the Beatles recorded at least half a dozen of his other songs (only two are on their records ["Roll over Beethoven" on With the Beatles and "Rock and Roll Music" on Beatles for Sale], but there are a lot more on the Live at the BBC albums). My argument for this specific influence is just conjecture, but I do think "Little Queenie" was floating around in Lennon and McCartney's heads (even if subconsciously) while they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There."
(Of course, only after I wrote all of that, I skimmed the Wikipedia article for "I Saw Her Standing There," and it seems to cast some doubt on what I've written. However, there is a quote from McCartney about how he used the bass part from Berry's "I'm Talking about You," so there is some of Berry's influence. Because I know the bass part for "I'm Talking about You" [I even notated it a couple weeks ago], it was pretty easy to figure out the bass part for "I Saw Her Standing There.")
