Monday, February 11, 2019

"Lucille"

I listened to the first disc of On Air - Live at the BBC, Volume 2 yester-day and noticed a few small things.

In "Lucille," the "go" in the line "Well, you know I love you baby; I'll never let you go" is sung with a melisma (Eb C).  Musically, this gives an impression of movement, although the word has a slightly different sense in this context.

I referenced the version of "Lucille" on the first Live at the BBC and discovered that this feature is present there too, but when I referenced Little Richard's original, I found that it doesn't even contain this line.  It's not in the Everly Brothers' version either (which presenter Brian Matthew specifically mentions in his introduction to the song on Live at the BBC).  The Beatles seem to have changed Little Richard's "Lucille, baby, satisfy my heart" into "Lucille, baby, satisfy my soul," and then fashioned their own line ("Well, you know I love you baby; I'll never let you go") to form something of a rhyme with "soul."