Martha My Dear is a track from the White Album written wholly by Paul McCartney and largely performed by McCartney with the addition of brass and strings scored by George Martin. Along with others recorded the in the first week of October 1968, the song was recorded at Trident Studios in Soho, rather than the Beatles’ more usual “home” at Abbey Road. It appears that George Harrison may have contributed some electric guitar (he is pictured in a photo of the session, but McCartney is also said to have overdubbed electric guitar in a later session), and the very short section of drums may have been played by Ringo Starr.
McCartney wrote the song initially as a stretching piano exercise for himself, with the words coming to mind later on. The “Martha” in the title refers to McCartney’s Old English Sheepdog, Martha, then a two year-old puppy which he had acquired not long after moving into his Cavendish Avenue flat. She was his first ever pet.
It’s interesting that McCartney felt that the dog brought him a little closer to Lennon. In The Lyrics he writes:
I got Martha and she was a lovely little dog. I just adored her. One of the unlikely side effects was that John became very sympathetic towards me. When he came round and saw me playing with Martha, I could tell that he liked her. John was a very guarded person, which was partly where all his wit came from. He’d had a very difficult upbringing, what with his father leaving home, his uncle dying, his mother getting killed in a traffic accident. By the time I knew him, he could be very sarcastic. Not that I couldn’t be too. It was my own way of dealing with my mother’s death, I expect. We were both quite into the witty put-down. But seeing me with Martha, with my guard down, all of a sudden he started warming to me. And so he let his guard down too.
The song also had a subtler connection to a relative’s affair:
… as the song proceeds, Martha morphs into a person. As it happens, I had a relative who was having an affair and who came down to London to tell me about it. Maybe for some hand-holding. If you think about it, by 1968 I represented a breath of freedom. I was now slightly outside the circle. This relative could confide in me in a way that maybe wouldn’t have been possible with other members of the gossipy Liverpool family. I’m the only person who knew the song was about someone having an affair, and that gives a line like ‘When you find yourself in the thick of it’ an added layer of poignancy.
The song is a mellow, homely and reassuring tune not a million miles away in tone from Honey Pie (recorded the same day, but with different session players) or Mother Nature’s Son. Overall McCartney’s contributions to the White Album are definitely skewed toward the light-hearted, bucolic and unthreatening. it is noticeable that the more independently he works from the other Beatles, the more he tends to strike this comforting mode. If anything, Lennon’s more independent work was moving in the opposite direction.
Although the dominant feeling in Martha My Dear is mellow, it does feature a slightly rocky bridge, “Take a good look around you” which briefly introduces the electric guitar, drums and a more driving rhythm. This brief shift and subtle of genres within a song is carried out quite successfully, and points the way toward McCartney’s ideas for the Abbey Road medley and for similar and more dramatic shifts in his solo work (Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, Live And Let Die).
The Beatles BibleThe jaunty ‘Martha My Dear’ was written by Paul McCartney as a piano exercise, and was released on the White Album.
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