The Beatles song that saw John Lennon and Paul McCartney pay tribute to their heroes

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The Beatles song that saw John Lennon and Paul McCartney pay tribute to their heroes

Ben Forrest

Sun 28 December 2025

(Credits: Far Out / Eric Koch for Anefo)

The Beatles went against the grain of popular music in a multitude of ways, and while many of their contemporaries were trying their darndest to hide the influences they were lifting their sound from, the Fab Four always wore their inspiration on their sleeve, paying open tribute to the artists that first inspired them.

Motown master Smokey Robinson once claimed that The Beatles were “the first really popular white band who came right out and said, ‘We grew up and were very influenced by black music.’” On the face of it, every rock and roll musician was indebted to ‘black music’, given the roots of the genre within the world of blues, but it is true that the Merseyside mop tops were among the first to advertise that fact. 

Throughout their revolutionary tenure, in fact, The Beatles never made any effort to conceal the source of their musical inspiration. Whether it was their various covers of Chuck Berry, Little Richard or, indeed, Smokey Robinson, or the multitude of references and knowing nods they weaved into their songwriting, there was never any doubt over what the band’s listening habits consisted of. 

Even as the band progressed, transforming from the fresh-faced teeny-boppers of their early years to the moustached psychedelic experimenters of the Sgt. Pepper era, the group never lost sight of the pioneering outfits who first inspired them all those years ago. On their final record, Let It Be, in fact, the band paid faithful homage to one of their earliest inspirations, The Everly Brothers.

While nobody, in their right mind, could listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and claim that it sounds just like ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, the influence of Don and Phil is pretty undeniable when you revisit some of the Fab Four’s earliest efforts.

“You look at anyone’s career and there was always someone influential in the beginning,” McCartney once recalled in the anniversary edition of Let It Be. “I was Elvis. I was Little Richard. George was Carl Perkins, John was Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry. We all had our alter egos, and we each had a few of them. And we were The Everly Brothers.”

When it came time to record Let It Be, then, the band decided to pay homage to that rock and roll fraternity on McCartney’s track ‘Two of Us’. Lyrically, the song is a fairly run-of-the-mill McCartney love song, dedicated to Linda Eastman, whom he would marry only a few months after the song was recorded. Sonically, though, the song was indebted to the iconic harmonies of the Everly Brothers.

At one point in the song, in fact, McCartney tells Lennon to “Take it Phil,” identifying his songwriting partner as being the Phil to his Don – even if that line is sometimes wrongly thought to reference the song’s now-disgraced producer, Phil Spector.

‘Two of Us’ certainly isn’t the only example of The Beatles referencing their musical inspirations within their own discography, but it is telling of just how enduring the influence of The Everly Brothers was on the band that they would maintain their appreciation for the duo from the earliest origins of the band right up until their final album.