Writing “Eleanor Rigby”: How one of the Beatles’ greatest songs came to be.

This song is widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces in pop music history. Released in 1966, it marked a giant leap forward in the way that The Beatles thought about their art, following their exploration of new and more complex musical ideas.

Written and performed by Paul McCartney as part of the "Revolver" sessions, the track features a string composition from George Martin that helped to change the way that people considered pop music.

Here's how Sir McCartney describes coming up with the idea for the song and the character of Eleanor Rigby -- including her name (from The New Yorker, Oct.18, 2021).

Compare it with how Pip imagines the identity and story of his family members simply by looking at their tombstones in a church graveyard in the incipit of Great Expectations:

"My mum’s favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day. That’s the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps “in a jar by the door.” I was always a little scared by how often women used cold cream.

Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around her house and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy. Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. (...)

Eleanor Rigby may actually have started with a quite different name. Daisy Hawkins, was it? I can see that “Hawkins” is quite nice, but it wasn’t right. (...)

This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it’s sometimes very difficult to pin down.

It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John [Lennon] and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future. I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally. (...)

Initially, the priest was “Father McCartney,” because it had the right number of syllables. I took the song to John at around that point, and I remember playing it to him, and he said, “That’s great, Father McCartney.” He loved it. But I wasn’t really comfortable with it, because it’s my dad—my father McCartney—so I literally got out the phone book and went on from “McCartney” to “McKenzie.”

The song itself was consciously written to evoke the subject of loneliness, with the hope that we could get listeners to empathize. Those opening lines—“Eleanor Rigby / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream.” It’s a little strange to be picking up rice after a wedding. Does that mean she was a cleaner, someone not invited to the wedding, and only viewing the celebrations from afar? Why would she be doing that? I wanted to make it more poignant than her just cleaning up afterward, so it became more about someone who was lonely. Someone not likely to have her own wedding, but only the dream of one.

Allen Ginsberg [N.B. American poet, one of the leaders of the "Beat Generation" in the 1950s] told me it was a great poem."

The author’s handwritten lyrics for “Eleanor Rigby,” from 1966.