Song of the Day 9/7: The Beatles, “Do You Want to Know a Secret”

Pete ‘n’ Val have a secret, but it’s not hard to guess what it is: Gerald Brady will not be expelled from the General Assembly.

This was the first Beatles single to feature George Harrison on lead vocal. The tune was composed in autumn 1962, primarily by John Lennon, who based it on the first two lines of a song in Walt Disney’s “Snow White” that his mother used to sing to him. They recorded it as part of a nearly 10-hour session that became the band’s debut British LP, “Please Please Me.” Lennon once said, in his snide way, that he gave the song to Harrison because “it only had three notes and he wasn’t the best singer in the world.” Released as a single in 1964, it reached No. 2, kept out of the top spot by their own “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

The Beatles never released the song as a single in England, partly because manager Brian Epstein’s other band, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, released their 45 about the time “Please Please Me” hit the stores. Their version went to No. 1 in Britain in 1963.

BTW, here’s a clip of Walt Disney’s “Snow White” that includes the song Lennon’s mother Julia used to sing to him. It’s worth seeing not so much for the song as the incredible animation and its cinematic sensibility. The realism of the wash water on the stone steps and the fluttering doves are impressive, but the shots looking up through the surface of the water from the bottom of the well are directorial genius. It illustrates why this film stunned Hollywood so much that Disney was given a special Academy Award in 1938, a year after it was nominated for Best Musical Score.