{"id":215,"date":"2025-01-12T21:19:08","date_gmt":"2025-01-12T21:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/?p=215"},"modified":"2025-07-14T12:18:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T12:18:39","slug":"160-old-brown-shoe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/160-old-brown-shoe\/","title":{"rendered":"160: Old Brown Shoe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"BeatlesThe Beatles Bible<\/span><\/div>

Written by George Harrison, \u2018Old Brown Shoe\u2019 was originally released as the b-side of \u2018The Ballad Of John And Yoko\u2019. It remains a largely overlooked gem from The Beatles\u2019 back catalogue.<\/p>\"TheContinue reading on Beatles Bible \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div>

\"Wikipedia\"Wikipedia<\/span><\/div>
"Old Brown Shoe" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. Written by George Harrison, the group's lead guitarist, it was released on a non-album single in May 1969, as the B-side to "The Ballad of John and Yoko". The song was subsequently incl…<\/div>Continue reading on Wikipedia \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

Old Brown Shoe is song written by George Harrison and originally rehearsed by the Beatles during the Get Back\/Let It Be sessions, but only released later, after further recordings, as the B-side of a single, The Ballad Of John And Yoko. However, it was also selected for inclusion on the Blue Album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am pretty sure that the Old Brown Shoe of the title is a neat metaphor for the physical body (in the context of incarnation). I think I must have read or heard this somewhere else; I remember being initially puzzled by the strange title. However, I haven’t been able to track down the source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harrison himself, and several commentators have talked about the theme being “duality”. There are lots of opposites in the lyrics, right\/wrong, short\/long, smile\/frown, but the title implies that the big idea is body v soul; the body being something that you can “step out” of. It would certainly fit with George’s views on (re-)incarnation. For example, in an interview with Good Morning Australia’s Kerri-Anne Kennerley he said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“\u2026how I see it is that the soul is in this body for a period of time. and then it leaves the body. It\u2019s like in a way the body\u2019s like a suit that you put on.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So if that’s what the songs about, I think it’s a neat title and concept. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other lyrics do not really develop the idea, and seem more like word play – opposites being used as a linguistic trick to help generate ideas<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.thebeatles.com\/old-brown-shoe<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Get Back movie, George explains that the song was written between sessions overnight on 26th-27th January 1968. The next day he told Lennon and the others:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“Oh, I went to bed very late. I wrote a great song actually\u2026 Happy and a rocker\u2026 I keep thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll just go to bed now,’ and then I keep hearing your voice [Lennon’s] from about ten years ago, saying, ‘Finish ’em straight away: as soon as you start ’em, you finish ’em’ , you once told me.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Musically the song is unusual in having a kind of shuffled off-beat march rhythm. Some call it ska. It’s rhythmically similar but, to me, the instrumentation makes it sound more like a sped-up blues, albeit one with a much more experimental and optimistic chord progression, if that makes sense?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s notable that after the Get Back sessions Harrison returned to this song creating his own more detailed demos to lay out the arrangement as he saw it. I think by this late stage in the Beatles’ career Harrison, McCartney and Lennon’s writing and preferred arrangements were diverging rapidly. Many (but not all) their contributions around this time begin to take on the shape of their later solo projects, and sound decidedly less “Beatley”. In these cases, even when multiple Beatles are on the record, the direction is coming from a single individual. Old Brown Shoe fits this pattern it’s quite a rocky dense arrangement with emphasis on slide guitar, elements that would recur on his first post-Beatle solo album All Things Must Pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old Brown Shoe is song written by George Harrison and originally rehearsed by the Beatles during the Get Back\/Let It Be sessions, but only released later, after further recordings, as the B-side of a single, The Ballad Of John And Yoko. However, it was also selected for inclusion on the Blue Album. I am pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8,9,11,6],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-song-a-day","tag-b-side","tag-blue-album","tag-harrison","tag-single"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}