"Glad All Over"

I listened to the second disc of On Air - Live at the BBC, Volume 2 yester-day and noticed a small feature in "Glad All Over," specifically in the line "My temperature's low; fever is high."  "My temperature's low" is sung almost entirely to C# notes (I think "low" is sung with a descending glissando from C# to A), and "fever is high" is sung to a group of ascending notes (C# C# D E, I think).  The first half of the melody for this phrase descends, and the second half ascends, musically giving a sense of the "low" and "high" in the lyrics.

This is also present in the version on Live at the BBC and in Carl Perkins' original (although Perkins' is a half-step lower, and this particular line might have some slight differences in articulation).

"For You Blue"

I listened to Let It Be on 30 January and Let It Be... Naked on 31 January because according to Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, some of the Let It Be songs were recorded on those two days fifty years ago.  I noticed something about "For You Blue," but I had to do some research before I wrote about it.

About a minute in, George Harrison says, "Bop, cat, bop."  I think this might be a bit of Gene Vincent's influence.  Leading into an instrumental section in Vincent's "Bluejean Bop," he shouts to his band, "Bop, Blue Caps, bop."  Harrison's "Bop, cat, bop" - spoken during an instrumental section - isn't too dissimilar.  In the Anthology book, Harrison even mentions "Bluejean Bop" specifically (p. 49).

The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and the Anthology 3 liner notes mention that the Beatles played through three Vincent songs ("Ain't She Sweet," "Who Slapped John?" and "Be-Bop-A-Lula") during the Abbey Road sessions (on 24 July 1969) but that "For You Blue" was recorded before this (on 25 January 1969).  Anthology 3, however, also explains that "the version on the album Let It Be featured a lead vocal re-recorded by George on 8 January 1970."  It's possible, then, that running through those Gene Vincent songs in July 1969 recalled "Bluejean Bop" and eventually resulted in the "Bop, cat, bop" in "For You Blue."

"The Hippy Hippy Shake"

When I listened to On Air - Live at the BBC Volume 2 recently, I noticed that some of the "shake"s in "The Hippy Hippy Shake" (specifically the one after the line "Do the hippy hippy shake shake with all of your might") are sung with a melisma (G E).  Since the note changes, there's a musical sense of that "shak[ing]."

I think this is also present in the version on Live at the BBC, but it's more subtle.

"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."