From Me to You

On the morning of March 5th, 1963, the Beatles posed for a number of publicity photographs outside EMI House in Manchester Square in London.  They then reported to Abbey Road Studios to begin the real work of the day - recording both sides of their third single.

Only five days earlier, the letter column From You to Us in the New Musical Express newspaper had provided John and Paul with the inspiration for the song that would turn out to be the A-side of that single.  On a leg of the Helen Shapiro tour traveling from York to Shrewsbury, they crafted this true Lennon/McCartney collaboration before the bus even arrived at its destination.

With the band on their usual instruments, the basic track was achieved in seven takes.  John then overdubbed some harmonica parts at producer George Martin's suggestion since the harmonica had been featured on their first two singles.  Martin also insisted that John and Paul wordlessly sing along with the harmonica melody in order to punch up the introduction of the song.

Upon its release in April, From Me to You truly catapulted the Beatles to national prominence.  It spent seven weeks at number one due, at least in part, to tireless promotion by the band.  They played this song more than any other in their many appearances on BBC radio, in addition to multiple performances on various television programs.  They even briefly had their own radio show called From Us to You, which used a variation of the original lyrics as its theme song.

Though wildly popular in the UK, the song went relatively unknown in the US, even after Del Shannon released a cover version.  As the Beatles' second single on Vee-Jay Records in May of '63, it did next to nothing on the Billboard chart, stopping at number 116.  Once Beatlemania arrived here in January of 1964, Vee-Jay re-released it as a B-side to Please Please Me, but it just missed the Top 40, peaking at number 41.

Capitol Records somehow managed to overlook the song throughout the group's entire career.  In 1973, it finally appeared on the greatest hits package commonly known as the Red Album.  A cardboard insert in that compilation mistakenly listed the song as a track from the American Help! LP (astute observers will note that it is not the only error in that insert pictured above), but the From Me to You Fantasy featured on Help! is merely a deconstruction of the song by Ken Thorne as part of his score for the James Bond parody.  This music plays about midway through the film during the beginning of the small Paul sequence.

In 1994, Live at the BBC gave us the opportunity to hear the From Us to You theme song - a rarity that I'm sure most of us Americans never even knew existed until then.  A year later, Anthology 1 presented a fantastic performance of From Me to You done in late '63 for Swedish radio.  This lacks John's harmonica, but the overall drive is stronger than that on the single thanks no doubt to the presence of an enthusiastic live audience.

Of course, the song appeared on several compilations over the years including A Collection of Beatles Oldies, 20 Greatest Hits (the UK version), Past Masters Volume One and the 2000 worldwide bestseller 1.  And the video compilation 1+ gives us their rendition of the number at the famous Royal Variety Performance from November of 1963, a pivotal moment of Beatlemania.