Baby It’s You is one of two Shirelles’ covers (along with with Boys) to appear on the Beatles’ first album Please Please Me.
The Beatles Bible‘Baby It’s You’ was the 10th song recorded during The Beatles’ marathon 11 February 1963 session, in which they recorded the bulk of their debut album Please Please Me.
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Wikipedia
The Beatles’ first heroes may have been artists like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Little Richard, the best known Rock’n’roll stars, but by the time they made their first record – judging at least by the track listing – they were at least as influenced by the New York girl groups.
Like the Cookies, (another girl group, covered in yesterday’s article on Chains, which also appears on Please Please Me), the Shirelles were working closely with writers and producers working in the Brill Building. They had formed at school and had been heard by the mother of one of their schoolmates, Florence Greenberg, who decided to manage them and to set up her own record label. After bringing in Luther Dixon as staff writer and producer, the Shirelles had a meteoric rise to fame; a top forty breakthrough with Tonight’s The Night followed by a huge hit with Will You [Still] Love Me Tomorrow written (like Chains) by Goffin and King (the B-side of Will You Love Me Tomorrow is Boys). But after a couple more top 10 records (including Mama Said) the hits had started to dry up:
… the group’s singles started doing less well again. To reverse the downward trend, Dixon brought in a song by another new writer, Burt Bacharach. Bacharach had written a song with Mack David — the brother of his usual lyricist Hal David — called “I’ll Cherish You”. Dixon liked the song, but thought the lyrics were a bit too sickly. He changed the lyrics around, making them instead about someone who still loves her boyfriend despite her friends telling her how bad he is, and retitling it “Baby It’s You”. (Andrew Hickey, A History of Rock in 500 Songs)
Baby It’s You was released in the USA in November 1961 reaching number 8 in the Billboard Hot 100.
The Beatles had been following the Shirelles from the outset, they already performed (but never recorded) Will You Love Me Tomorrow, and had brought Boys into their set. Increasingly, according to Mark Lewisohn, they were seeing the Brill Building sound as new and fresh, while some of their earlier enthusiasms were starting to feel dated:
Gender didn’t stop the Beatles (or other Liverpool groups) singing these numbers – a good song was a good song and that was enough for them… To the Beatles, to John and Paul especially, the composer credit Goffin-King would become nothing less than a trademark of quality, sufficient in itself to make them listen to or buy a record, and rarely were they disappointed.
Ever receptive to the latest sounds, eager to adapt to changes… there was one casualty in particular… Not that they routinely sang all of Elvis’s records, but they never performed any new Elvis material again. Anything of his they played now was an oldie, often announced as such – and, as usual, they were of one mind about the rightness of their thinking. ‘I went off Elvis after he left the army,’ [Paul]… ‘‘They cut his bollocks off’ [John].
The new messiah was Luther Dixon, the producer behind the Shirelles’ sound. John sang Will You Love Me Tomorrow and Boys, Paul did Mama Said, and now John grabbed their latest release, Baby It’s You, out [in the UK] on EMI’s Top Rank label at the beginning of February [1962]. It wasn’t written by Goffin-King but was in their style, being a modern girl-boy love song wrapped in a sparse, quirky, jerky beat. (excerpts from All These Years: Volume One – Tune In, Mark Lewisohn)
By the time Please Please Me was recorded, Baby It’s You had been in the Beatles repertoire for about a year but was still fresh. The Beatles wanted to be new and different, and they selected the songs for their first album accordingly. Some of their own material had a certainly showed an old-school rock and roll influence, but the covers complemented that with a more up-to-the minute R&B/pop sound, and, to appeal to a broader audience “easy listening” in the form of A Taste Of Honey. Because they had been playing together so intensively over the previous two and a half years, the Beatles were able to draw these different styles and genres together into a coherent blend, so in their hands it was increasingly difficult to see the join.
Baby It’s You shows why the Shirelles’/Brill Building sound was such a good match for the Beatles personalities – the vocal arrangement has a bit of wit about it – “you should hear what they say about you; cheat, cheat (sha la la la la)”…
but the song also allows for moments of pathos, which Lennon delivers unironically:
so overall it has a kind of knowing sincerity, simultaneously light and heartfelt – like young love. And it’s a beautiful, catchy pop song.